• Vollprecht, Daniel
• Pretz, Thomas
• Lopez, Cristina García
• Lucas, Hugo Ignacio
• Parrodi, Juan Carlos Hernández
• Friedrich, Bernd
• Raulf, Karoline
• Pomberger, Roland

Abstract

Nonferrous metals (NFM) contribute the most to the revenues that might be generated by the implementation of landfill mining (LFM). However, metals in landfills undergo stronger degradation compared to that of their normal use, which might lead to a lower scrap quality compared to conventional scrap. Nowadays, there is information about the most common metals found in LFM, but no reliable data about their quality. In general, excavated landfill material is processed mechanically through different steps, such as particle size separation and metal classification by magnetic and eddy current separation. The subject of this work is the characterisation of NFM recovered from a landfill in Belgium with the goal to assess the quality of metals for marketing purposes. In this study, two questions about the real concentration of metals and the marketability of NFM are discussed. A primary evaluation shows that there is around 5 kg of NFM per ton of excavated material processed at the Mont-Saint-Guibert landfill. Besides, through thermal treatment, it was possible to find out that on average only 70 wt% of the NFM is metallic being the rest, defilements (30 wt%) strongly attached. As a result, a technical assessment was carried out following two approaches. In the first approach, 7 types of scraps can be potentially recovered from NFM: two different qualities of Al scrap, two of Cu, one of Pb, one of Zn, and one of stainless steel. In the second approach, NFM might be commercialised directly from the landfill as a mixed nonferrous scrap.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• stainless steel