CHEMICAL MINERALOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF CONSTRUCTION AND DEMOLITION WASTE MATERIALS

EU Directives and Italian Legislation are encouraging recycling of construction and demolition waste materials, provided by continuous urban redevelopment to face the pressing landfill shortage (i.e., limited area for storing, with related increase of the storing costs), and to limit the quarrying activity of alluvial sediments that often induce environmental problems. Attention has been focused on chemical-mineralogical and technical (physical-mechanical) features of these materials, to provide recycling strategies, ecologically correct and economically advantageous. In this light, we have studied construction and demolition waste materials from a landfill of Ferrara, performing: a) careful grain-size sorting, b)chemical (XRF) and mineralogical (XRD) analyses of the different grain-size fractions. This approach has allowed us to recognise particular grain-size fractions tha can be profitably re-utilised by the building industry