The building materials are subject to lixiviation, which can lead to environmental contamination. In Brazil, the environmental assessment of building materials and components with waste is carried out employing the same methods and parameters used to evaluate waste, in small solid samples, which do not reproduce the type of exposure the component is subject to. This paper proposes and discusses the feasibility of two testing methods to obtain the leached extract for the environmental assessment of building materials and components: one by immersion, which simulates a scenario of intense and prolonged exposure to the leaching solution, as in flooding; and another one by irrigation in order to simulate exposure to acid rain. It was proposed plates measuring 25x200x400 mm as test specimens. The leaching solution was a nitric acid with pH 3.0 ± 0.05. Fired-clay test samples with and without the addition of chrome oxide were produced. The testes were conducted in four 7-day cycles. The leached extracts were collected at the end of each cycle samples. After each one of four 7-day exposure cycles it was possible to observe a tendency to stabilization in the concentration of Cr in the leached extract, which corroborates the feasibility of the experiment in a twenty-eight days period.
Environmental assessment; Lixiviation; Test methods; Red ceramic; Chrome
