Former Murano Bead Production Site
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Former Murano Bead Production Site

Regenerating a Contaminated Zone

Former Murano Bead Production Site
By Editorial Staff -

An old section of the island of Murano, in Venice, where famed Murano beads were made, has been regenerated to provide housing units in what has become a major example of sustainable urban regeneration. Mapei was heavily involved with its HPSS system during the environmental reclamation phase and, afterwards, with various of its building materials. The old industrial area was acquired by the Venice municipality after the glass-making industry that thrived in the early 19th-century fell away. The regeneration project focused on building housing units, a hotel, shops and artisan workshops. However, the nearly 14,000 sq.m site was contaminated with heavy metals up to a depth of 2 m, meaning the first step had to be reclamation, which was done with Mapei’s HPSS (High Performance Solidification Stabilization) system. Developed in Mapei’s Milan laboratory, this technology immobilizes the contaminants in the earth in an inorganic binder matrix - preventing them from leaking into the environment - and removes the volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds. This turns the contaminated land into a granular material with excellent mechanical properties that passes the leaching test for reusable materials established by a Ministerial Decree from 5 February 1998 and that is similar to the end-of-waste state of artificial aggregates. HPSS technology meant the treated material could be employed on the site in the building work (infrastructure and non), thus cutting the prohibitive costs of transporting contaminated material to a landfill and purchasing new filling materials. Indeed, without such a solution, the entire project might have been at risk.

 

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