Detection of asbestos containing material in post-earthquake building waste through hyperspectral imaging and micro-x-ray fluorescence

During an earthquake, a large amount of waste was generated, and many Asbes-tos-Containing Materials (ACM) were unintentionally destroyed. ACM is a mixture of cement matrix and asbestos fiber, widely used in construction materials, that causes serious diseases such as lung cancer, mesothelioma and asbestosis, as a conse-quence of inhalation of the asbestos fiber. In order to reuse and recycle Post -earth- quake Building Waste (PBW) as secondary raw material, ACM must be separately collected and deposited from other wastes during the recycling process. The work aimed to develop a non-destructive, accurate and rapid method to detect ACM and recognize different types of PBW to obtain the best method to correctly identify and separate different types of material. The proposed approach is based on Hyper -spectral Imaging (HSI) working in the short-wave infrared range (SWIR, 1000-2500 nm), followed by the implementation of a classification model based on hierarchical Partial Least Square Discriminant Analysis (hierarchical-PLS-DA). Micro-X-ray fluo- rescence (micro-XRF) analyses were carried out on the same samples in order to evaluate the reliability, robustness and analytical correctness of the proposed HSI approach. The results showed that the applied technology is a valid solution that can be implemented at the industrial level.