Lane minerali di vecchia generazione: la pericolosità del rifiuto dismesso

The projections on the effects of the current state incentives (EcoBonus, Facades Bonus, SuperBonus) for energy efficiency are encouraging for an effective renovation of the construction sector; it is hoped not only to raise the entire supply chain from the economic and working immobility of the last period but also to extend, to a wider fabric, the principles of sustainability and circularity, by now conceptually assimilated but operationally less pursued. The removal of degraded plasters, of obsolete insulating panels or those that do not comply with the new directives, and of windows with poor performance will result in a substantial amount of material for which it will be necessary to evaluate the future in view of the end of waste. The topic becomes of particular interest if applied to insulation in Man-Made Vitreous Fiber (MMVF) of which the healthiness of the entire life cycle has been questioned, and recycling opportunities have been experimented with scraps derived from production but not from demolition. The study concerns mineral wools, whose dismantling and recycling would require a preliminary knowledge of the generation they belong to, if prior or subsequent to Directive 97/69/EC with which Note Q and Note R were introduced to declare the non-carcinogenicity of the MMVF products. The complexity of the issue required its articulation into two complementary contributions, one regarding the riskiness of discarded waste and the other the solutions that research and industry are applying or considering for circularity. This first in-depth analysis has become an opportunity to identify the criteria on which to base a plausible “genealogical certificate” of mineral wool waste and to estimate the extent of dismantling that wide energy efficiency measures can produce. The assessment has been carried out on production data available for the past, in view of applications presented in the paper “Old generation” mineral wools: the circularity of discarded waste.