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Large clayey sedimentary layers are extracted as waste rock material to reach the phosphate ores. Considered as mining wastes intimately mixed with other silicated and carbonated lithologies, they are stored as coarse waste rocks in large dumps nearby the phosphate mines; as it is the case of Gantour mine of OCP group (Morocco). These clay occurrences have been investigated as a raw material for the production of ceramics, especially fired clay bricks.

In this paper, pressed and fired briquettes made of the isolated clayey lithology were manufactured. The clay material mineralogy include dolomite, quartz, palygorskite, and montmorillonite. The as-formed briquettes were oven dried at 105 °C then fired in the range 900–1100 °C. Both raw and sintered samples (at various temperature) were investigated by differential thermal and thermogravimetric analysis (TG-DTA), X-ray diffraction (XRD), optical and …