Innovative Use of Scrap and Waste Deriving From the Stone and the Construction Sector for the Manufacturing of Bricks. Review of the International Scenario and Analysis of an Italian Case Study

Abstract

The construction sector has evolved a lot over the last few years promoting the design and manufacturing of innovative and environmentally sustainable materials and products. In accordance with European and national guidelines, with a growing awareness of environmental issues several experiences are showing the interest of companies to qualify their products as green and environmentally sustainable. In the European context many directives have been introduced which, among their themes, speak of circular economy, reduction of the use of resources, better efficiency of production, etc. At the same time, initiatives related to the GPP were activated in the Italian context, that foresee an increase of the recycled content in building materials. Especially the brick manufacturing industry is very sensitive to the issue of the waste recovery and many experiences show that is possible to obtain optimum products with weighted material mixes (virgin raw materials and secondary raw materials). This procedure also contributes to a gradual recovery of waste otherwise disposed of in landfills. In the international scenario there are many studies about the reuse of waste and scraps in the bricks material mixes; the studies mainly derive from heterogeneous sectors as, for example: fly ash from coal plants, scraps and waste from the natural stone extraction, ceramic production residue, aggregates from demolition, waste oil, slag from steel mills, sawmill sludge and dust, glass powdered, recycled plastic, textile fibers, etc. The analysis of many experiences highlighted two key issues: the importance of cross-sectorial exchanges as a condition for enabling strategies of circular economy and the high intrinsic value of the material scrap. Particular attention has been paid to the Catalyst case study, a company that has developed different types of bricks, produced almost entirely with secondary raw material.

Application of circular economy principles in buildings: A systematic review

“…In addition, studies were also analysed with respect to the 3Rs hierarchy (reduce, reuse, and recycle) of circular economy. A total of 28 literatures carried out researches in this area (design for recycling), 8 studies in this review had published on the reduction of material consumption through the design of reusable components, notably the following literatures (Sansom and Avery 2014;Kreilis and Zeltins 2017;Akanbi et al 2018;Migliore et al 2018;Cruz Rios et al 2019;Saint et al 2019;Milios and Dalhammar 2020). 12 literatures had special interest on the adaptability of materials to recycling, studies such as (Huang et al 2018) which focused on the 3Rs hierarchy was also reviewed.…”

Bibliographic mapping of post-consumer plastic waste based on hierarchical circular principles across the system perspective

“… [ 140 ] X Product design using sharing economy and IoT concept. [ 146 ] X Reusing secondary material from landfills to manufature bricks in Italy. [ 151 ] X Bricks made from plastic waste.…”

“…Reduce (R2) strategy reflects the circular preference to reduce raw material consumption during production through innovative plastic packaging design [ 210 ]. At product level, the topic focuses on reuse (R3) of recycled plastic to produce bricks [ 146 ], and reusable plastic crates [ 229 ]. Other topics include the consideration of product reusability throughout its lifecycle when designing products for helicopter canopies [ 109 ].…”

A literature review on circular economy adoption in the manufacturing sector

“…Reuse (Hasegawa et al, 2019); (Rodgers et al, 2019); (Tua et al, 2019); (Bag et al, 2019); (Nascimento et al, 2019); (Biganzoli et al, 2019); (Charnley, F., Tiwari, D., Hutabarat, W., Moreno, M., Okorie, O., Tiwari, 2019); (Stropnik et al, 2018); (Migliore et al, 2018); (Liu et al, 2018); (Coughlan et al, 2018); (Bradley et al, 2018); (Minunno et al, 2018); (Atlason et al, 2017); (Zhou et al, 2017); (Jensen and Remmen, 2017); (Gilbert et al, 2017); (Saritas and Proskuryakova, 2017); (Shahbazi et al, 2016); (Tsiliyannis, 2016); (Zhu and Chertow, 2016); (Takata et al, 2019); (Mohammed et al, 2018); (Wu et al, (Alkhayyal, 2019); (Lapko et al, 2019); (Abuabara et al, 2019); (Secondi et al, 2019); (Niu et al, 2019); (Banguera et al, 2018a); (Gaustad et al, 2018); (Rieckhof and Guenther, 2018a); (Mangla et al, 2018); (M. ; (Braun et al, 2018a); (Moktadir et al, 2018); (Minunno et al, 2018); (Low et al, 2016); (Accorsi et al, 2015); (Wei et al, 2013); (Jiliang...…”

“…Industrial symbiosis and Eco-industrial parks (Ali et al, 2019); (Barreira et al, 2019); (Nuss et al, 2019); (Domenech et al, 2019); (Migliore et al, 2018); (Minunno et al, 2018); (Editors et al, 2018); (Prosman et al, 2017); (Halstenberg et al, 2017); (Husgafvel et al, 2016); (Karayannis, 2016); (Mirabella et al, 2014) (Cooper, 2019); (Jakhar et al, 2019); (Medeiros et al, 2019); (Dominish et al, 2018); (Braun et al, 2018b); (Neligan, 2018); (Walker et al, 2018); (Wang et al, 2018b); (Wang and Zhang, 2018); (Wang et al, 2018a); (Zairul et al, 2018); (Smieja and Babcock, 2017); (Ingarao, 2017); (Di Maio et al, 2017); (Câmpean et al, 2017); (Shahbazi et al, 2016); (Pagotto and Halog, 2016); (Li et al, 2019); (Graedel et al, 2019); (Wiedenhofer et al, 2019); (Yu et al, 2018); (Garmulewicz et al, 2018) Among all, cleaner production strategy is considered a precursor of CE since it enables systems to reduce at minimum toxic substances used in the production process and to limit and reduce resources consumption. It is based on principles such as product optimization, input substitution, sharing of renewable and recyclable resources (Sousa-Zomer et al, 2018a).…”