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Organisation
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Organisation Chart
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Materials and the Environment
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Contaminant Transport and Environmental Technologies
One of the Federal Government's sustainability goals is to double resource productivity by 2020 (as of 1994). This can be done if waste is increasingly used as a source for secondary raw materials. When these are used, contaminants can be released into the environment, polluting for instance soil or groundwater. This is why the Contaminant Transport and Environmental Technologies division investigates the behaviour of contaminants in different environmental substances using a variety of methods.
We also investigate the potential of wet processing methods to recover useful resources from waste. Not even sustainable waste management concepts can fully avoid the use of landfill sites, but these need to be safe and environmentally compatible. This division is the responsible certification authority in accordance with the Landfill Ordinance for geosynthetics, polymers and leak detection systems for landfill liners.
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Fields of expertise
- Assessment of inorganic and organic contaminant mobility from soils and waste materials, in particular the investigation of elution
- Waste treatment and recycling techniques
- Manufacture of reference materials from soils and waste (including coarse granularity) at small and bench scale
- Performance of robustness tests and round robin tests to validate methods
- Investigations on long-term behaviour of geosynthetics
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Main activities
- Evaluation of environmental compatibility of materials in contact with soil and groundwater, for example construction products, substitute construction products, and synthetic sports surfaces
- Processing of soil, waste and raw materials at small and field scales using a technical centre designed to be modular
- Investigation of long-term behaviour of geosynthetics
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Range of services/technical equipment
- Mobile environmental laboratory for sampling of waste at waste sites
- Lysimeter and automated percolation column layering
- Analytic laboratory (HPLC, GC-MS, ICP-OES, ICP-MS, IC, TOC, ED-RFA, microwave digestion system, various microscopes, soil examination processes)
- Laboratory for the investigation of geosynthetics (high-pressure autoclave test, tensile failure testing (NCTL), thermal analytical measurements (DSC), oxidation stability (OIT), tensile and shear creep tests
- Technical centre for wet processing methods (sieve system, jaw crusher, roller mill, ball mill, Eirich intensive mixer, layer separator machine, drum magnetic separator, centrifugal sorter, flotation device)
- Equipment for the production of representative sub-samples at various scales
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Publications of the division
