Excavation material as the new building resource for Zurich

Abstract

This Master-Thesis Excavation material as the new building resource for Zurich includes three parts of research. Firstly, a literature review was executed in order to find amounts of waste material, construction and demolition waste, excavation material and how much of it goes into landfill for different countries and cities within Europe. With this review, it was possible to see, that the Kanton Zurich is a representative area when comparing these amounts to other districts in Europe. In the second part, stakeholders who deal with excavation material were surveyed and asked to collect samples which were later analysed in the laboratory. The results of the investigation of five material samples showed high parts of fine grains (grain diameter smaller than 0,063 mm with a part more than 10%). This is also the reason why the most of the excavation material goes into landfill of gravel pits to refill the ditches as it is economically not possible for the most of the stakeholders to recycle these excavation materials. To show that there are other ways possible how to reuse this resource instead of using it for landfilling, the last part of this work is showing some construction material samples, which were created by mainly building with the sampled excavation materials.