Argille per laterizi in Italia: giacimenti e tendenze nel periodo 1960-2010

Italy is among the major brick manufacturers with 155 brickworks in operation for a current output around 10 million tons per year. Approximately 1,200 brickworks were in operation in the period 1960-2010, utilizing on the whole about 1 billion tons of clay materials extracted from about 1,700 quarries distributed all along the Italian peninsula. Industry has exploited a wide range of clay sources: recent alluvial, eluvial and colluvial deposits; Quaternary fluvio-glacial covers; Plio-Pleistocene lacustrine to marine sediments; a plethora of Tertiary to Cretaceous formations (from continental to deepsea origin, including tectonic mélanges). Such data base allows to draw a picture on the clay sources for different geographic areas and their variation along the last 50 years