Podaż surowców skaleniowych w Polsce ze źródeł krajowych i zagranicznych w świetle potrzeb rynku

The paper presents characteristics of the domestic market of feldspathic raw materials, analysing the most important features that influenced the supply and demand in the past decades as well as changes which have taken place in recent years due to economic crisis in western countries at the turn of 2008 and 2009 and the ongoing military conflict in the East, initiated in 2014. In this context, the quality requirements related to feldspar raw materials utilized in the ceramic and glass-making industries being their main users are depicted. In Poland, from the mid-1990s to the end of the first decade of the 21th century the growth in demandfor these materials was observed, mostly due to the expansion of the domestic ceramic tiles industry. That resulted in the necessity of supplementing of the domestic production by increasing importation, coming not only from traditional suppliers, such as the Czech Republic and Scandinavian countries, but also - since 2002 -from Turkey. This article presents the most important current foreign suppliers of feldspathic raw materials to Poland, describing the sources of these raw materials as well as the quality characteristics of the most important ones.