Natural Stone Cutting Plants and Amount of Waste Produced

Abstract

Marbles, travertines and andesite rocks have been common natural stones types economically mined in Turkey. When the waste, (unusable stone fragments, leftovers, micronized rock dust, slurry etc.) in consideration; wastes can be occurred in natural stone mines and additionally they can be produced in Natural Stone Dimensioning (NSD) plants. Wastes generated at a NSD plant near Elazig city (Turkey) have been perceived here to evaluate waste occurrence cases. When two typical equal sized natural stone blocks from the same stone mines are started to be dimensioned in a NSD plant (by using the same cutting and dimensioning machines), total saleable natural stone plates’ surface areas (for the similar plates) obtained at the end of the operation might be different. It was aimed in this study to observe and understand governing (influencing) parameters of these differences. Actually, factors influencing waste amounts in NSD plants can be related with: cutting machine and its disk & blade performances; different plate dimensions (thickness, length, width); discontinuity contents; irregularities in natural stone blocks, problems related with block and plate handlings, mechanical property differences in stones blocks, natural stone dimensioning machine types and their properties etc. Detail evaluations of these parameters have been performed and amount of waste volumes and percentages were calculated here to compare main influencing parameters