Wastes production in dimension stones industry: resources, factors, and solutions to reduce them

Abstract

Dimension stones industry is an industry with significant economic potential that has been overgrowing in recent years. Despite this growth, this industry faces several significant challenges, including very low efficiency, high production costs, and many wastes generation and resource loss during extraction and processing phases. To overcome these issues, further studies are needed to discover the causes of these problems, determine how to update existing technologies, replace them with more efficient alternatives, and find out how to use new and advanced optimization methods in dimension stones exploration and extraction and processing procedures. Regardless of the approach, these measures primary purpose should be to achieve better results in recovery rate, production costs, resource loss, and waste generation. In this paper, the amount of waste generated in different phases of the dimension stone production process was investigated. This investigation showed that about 51% of all the material extracted from dimension stone quarries turns into waste during the extraction operation, and roughly 41% of the material that arrives at dimension stone processing plants turns into waste during the processing operation. Therefore, the overall recovery rate of the dimension stone production process is approximately 29%, signifying the significant volumes of resources lost and the large amounts of waste generated. The paper also discusses the types of waste generated in different phases of the dimension stones production process, production factors in each case, and solutions that can be adopted to minimize waste generation in each phase of this industry.