Reuse of Marble Sludge Slime in Ceramic Industry

Ceramic industry is capable of incorporating and reusing different types of industrial waste materials. Recently, the reuse of ornamental stone cutting sludge slime in this industry is becoming a common practice. This work investigates the changes in the physical and mechanical properties of the produced ceramic tiles from raw materials containing marble sludge slime produced in the ornamental stone processing industry in Jordan. The results show that partial replacement of kaolin, feldspar and CaCO3 by the sludge slime caused a deformation out of the plane (binding) of the produced tiles. However, the replacement of all the pentonite by sludge slime did not affect the mechanical strength of the produced tiles and significantly decreased the shrinkage values of the tiles from 1.66% to 0.5 %. The results presented in this paper show that all of the produced sludge slime can be consumed successfully in ceramic production, which would decrease the expensive management of the residues with landfill and preserve an equivalent amount of natural mineral resources (pentonite); thus increasing the environmental sustainability.