Effects of cement addition and briquetting of rock wool on its geomechanical stability in landfills

Abstract

Landfilling of mineral wool waste in big bags at separate landfill compartments is required in Austria. This results in enormous differences in the Young’s moduli between common construction and demolition (C&D) waste compartments and mineral wool compartments, which causes severe accidents in terms of overturned vehicles due to sudden subsidence of the subsurface. Conditioning of mineral wool waste might be applied to adjust its geomechanical behaviour to that of common C&D waste but has never been investigated scientifically before. In this study we compare three scenarios for the conditioning of rock wool for landfilling: (A) loosely packing, (B) cutting comminution + cement addition and (C) cutting comminution + cement-supported briquetting. The performance of the different sample bodies under landfill conditions was simulated at the lab scale by cyclic loading (1223–3112 N, up to 160 cycles) using a ‘Wille Geotechnik UL 300’ press. The deformation was monitored during the experiment and Young’s modulus was derived graphically, whereas the test execution was piston controlled. The Young’s modulus increased during the experiments from 0.2 MPa to 4.6 MPa for scenario (A), from 0.6 MPa to 20.5 MPa for scenario (B) and from 7.5 MPa to 111.0 MPa for scenario (C). These results show that a combination of comminution and cement-supported briquetting significantly increases the geotechnical performance of mineral wool waste with respect to landfilling, which is still three orders of magnitude below that of common C&D waste, which is in the range of 30,000 MPa.