The Possibility of Implementation of West Ukrainian Paleogene Glauconite–Quartz Sands in the Building Industry: A Case Study

Abstract

The integrated use of minerals facilitates the reduction in the impact of mining on the environment. Many industries are in need of quartz sand in huge quantities. Quality requirements for quartz sand often refer to a high percentage of SiO2 and low content of Fe2O3, as well as the absence of clay impurities. The extraction of conditioned quartz sands and their close geographic location to consumers are economically profitable. Due to their wide distribution in Ukraine and their subsurface occurrence, glauconite-bearing Paleogene sands attract special attention. It has been experimentally confirmed that such sands are capable of dry magnetic separation. As a result of dry magnetic separation, three magnetic fractions and a nonmagnetic fraction were isolated. Glauconite was the dominant mineral in the magnetic fraction at 0.8 Tl. Their content was 5.1% and 2.8% in sand, respectively. The nonmagnetic fractions obtained from two studied samples were at 80.4 and 80.7%, respectively. XRF analyses showed that in each nonmagnetic fraction the content of SiO2 is at 96.9 wt.% and 93.7 wt.%, and Fe2O3 at 0.26 wt.% and 0.87 wt.%, respectively. In XRD, the nonmagnetic fractions contained 94.8% and 93.1% of sand, and 0.8% and 1.9% of glauconite, respectively. The values of the fineness moduli for the nonmagnetic fractions were 1.10 and 1.85. The size classes of quartz sands were 0.63 + 0 mm and −0.8 + 0 mm. Compared with current Ukrainian standards, the nonmagnetic fractions can be used in the building industry as well as in the manufacturing of glass, with the addition of a certain amount of glass from recycling.