Chemical sulphate removal for treatment of construction and demolition debris leachate

Abstract

Construction and demolition debris (CDD) is a product of construction, renovation or demolition activities. It has a high gypsum content (52.4% of total gypsum), concentrated in the CDD sand (CDDS) fraction. To comply with the posed limit of the maximum amount of sulphate present in building sand, excess sulphate needs to be removed. In order to enable reuse of CDDS, a novel treatment process is developed based on washing of the CDDS to remove most of the gypsum, and subsequent sulphate removal from the sulphate-rich CDDS leachate. This study aims to assess chemical techniques, i.e. precipitation and adsorption, for sulphate removal from the CDDS leachate. Good sulphate removal efficiencies (up to 99.9%) from the CDDS leachate can be achieved by precipitation with barium chloride (BaCl ₂) and lead(II) nitrate (Pb(NO ₃)₂). Precipitation with calcium chloride (CaCl ₂), calcium carbonate (CaCO ₃) and calcium oxide (CaO) gave less efficient sulphate removal. Adsorption of sulphate to aluminium oxide (Al ₂O ₃) yielded a 50% sulphate removal efficiency, whereas iron oxide-coated sand as adsorbent gave only poor (10%) sulphate removal efficiencies.

• adsorption
• chemical precipitation
• construction and demolition debris
• sulphate precipitation
• sulphate removal

Acknowledgements

The authors also sincerely thank Smink Afvalverwerking B.V. (Amersfoort, The Netherlands), which provided the construction and demolition debris for this study. The authors would like to thank Dr Eric D. van Hullebusch, the Laboratoire Géomatériaux et Environnement of the Université Paris-Est and the laboratory staff of UNESCO-IHE for the analytical support.

Funding

This research was supported through the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Environmental Technologies for Contaminated Solids, Soils, and Sediments () (FPA no. 2010–0009).