Water reservoir as resource of raw material for ceramic industry

Abstract

The industries related to the ceramics such as construction bricks, pottery and tile are the important sectors that cover the large part of the working population in Tunisia. The raw materials, clay or silt are excavated from opencast site of limestone clay stratum. The opencast site give the negative impact on landscape and environment, risks of landslide, soil erosion etc. On the other hand, a most serious problem in water resource management, especially in arid land such as Tunisia, is sedimentation in reservoirs. Sediment accumulation in the reservoirs reduces the water storage capacity. The authors proposed the exploitation of the sediment as raw material for the ceramics industries in the previous studies because the sediment in Tunisia is fine silt. In this study, the potential of the water reservoirs in Tunisia as the resource of the raw material for the ceramics industries is estimated from the sedimentation ratio in the water reservoirs.