C-DRONE GUIDE · 7 SEPTEMBER 2026

Drone and crushing-screening plant: ICPE heading 2515, mobile units, conical stockpiles and dust

A crushing and screening plant runs in the middle of its own noise, its own dust and its own piles. Around the machine, the yard lines up cones several metres high — 0/4, 4/10, 20/40, sands, ballast, recycled aggregates — whose contents make up a significant share of the operation's assets, and which nobody measures seriously any more once the financial year closes. Climbing an aggregate pile with a staff or a site GPS is slow, unpleasant and frankly risky ; the loader-bucket estimate that usually replaces it has no inventory value at all. That is what the drone changes most. It also documents the state of the plant itself — screens, transfer chutes, enclosures, water-spray bars — without stopping production. Here is the exact regulatory framework of ICPE heading 2515, what the flight brings, and what it never replaces.

Published on 7 September 2026, reviewed on 11 September 2026 — regulations in force as of September 2026.

ICPE heading 2515: permanent plant or mobile unit, two distinct regimes

A materials-processing plant falls in France under ICPE heading 2515, whose exact wording is : grinding, crushing, screening, bagging, pulverising, cleaning, sieving and mixing of stones, pebbles, ores and other natural or artificial mineral products, or of non-hazardous inert waste. That last clause is what brings a construction-and-demolition inert waste recycling platform and a hard-rock quarry's fixed plant under the same heading. The classification criterion is neither tonnage produced nor surface area : it is the combined power of the fixed machines contributing to the plant's operation, expressed in kilowatts.

The heading reads in two paragraphs, and that distinction is the most useful one to know. For a permanent plant (paragraph 1), power above 200 kW falls under registration, power above 40 kW and up to 200 kW under declaration. For a temporary installation (paragraph 2) — one processing materials extracted or produced on the installation's own site and operating over a single period of six months or less — the thresholds are far wider : registration above 350 kW, declaration between 40 and 350 kW. That regime is what lets a mobile unit come and crush a demolition site's concrete on the spot rather than haul it away ; it assumes both conditions are met, the origin of the materials as much as the single period of installation. Since decree no. 2018-900 of 22 October 2018, the authorisation regime has disappeared from this heading in favour of registration. General requirements come from the order of 30 June 1997 for declaration (amended by the order of 21 November 2017) and the order of 26 November 2012 for registration.

A word on this guide's scope, since neighbouring subjects are many and deliberately covered elsewhere. This guide is about the processing plant and its finished-product stockyard — not the extraction pit, whose stability is the subject of our guide to quarry face inspection ; not the calculation of extracted reserves, covered in our guide to quarry 3D modelling for the annual production declaration ; not the post-extraction phase, the subject of our guide to quarry rehabilitation monitoring. A quarry and its processing plant often share the same site and the same operator, but fall under different headings of the nomenclature, with their own requirements and deadlines.

Screens, transfer chutes, enclosures and spray bars: what an overflight documents

A crushing and screening plant is an assembly of steel structures permanently exposed to vibration, impact and abrasive material. The overflight produces an orthophoto and a 3D model of the whole, backed by close manual-flight shots of the sensitive points : screen frames and bearings (cracking at weld toes, visible play, deformed box panels), transfer chutes between primary crusher, secondary crusher and screens, chutes and skirting rubbers whose wear shows in thinning plate and fines spilling around the edges, feed hoppers and their grizzly bars, and the cladding, walkways and handrails of high platforms, usually the first things to corrode. On the conveyors linking it all, the detail of idlers, belt tracking and gallery structure belongs to our dedicated guide to industrial belt-conveyor inspection : this guide looks at the plant as a whole, the conveyor being only one structure among several.

The overflight also documents the dust-control equipment required by the order of 26 November 2012, whose article 37 provides, depending on the products and conditions, for enclosure with extraction connected to a treatment unit, misting, a device adapting free-fall height, and wetting of open-air stockpiles in dry weather. From the ground, there is no way to tell whether a spray bar at the head of a screen or above a transfer chute is really working along its whole length ; from above, a blocked nozzle, an enclosure panel removed and never refitted, a torn cover or a pinched water line is immediately visible. The same goes for the haul-road watering required by article 6 : the orthophoto shows which stretches are actually damp and which stay dry under the dumpers.

On the dust plume itself, we must be blunt. Aerial video, or a series of orthophotos taken in different wind conditions, shows how the dust behaves : where it starts, how far it travels, whether it crosses the site boundary, whether the water spray actually knocks it down. That is useful observation, it helps reposition a nozzle or a bund, and it usually beats a neighbourhood dispute with no imagery at all. But the drone measures no concentration and no deposition flux whatsoever. Regulatory monitoring, set out in article 39 of the same order, runs through a network of deposit gauges (standard NF X 43-014, 2017 version) or, failing that for existing plants, deposit plates (NF X 43-007, 2008), with at least one point measuring ambient background and continuous recording of wind speed and direction. Where the plant sits on a quarry producing more than 150,000 tonnes a year, the order of 22 September 1994 adds its own monitoring plan, with a target of 500 mg/m² per day as a rolling annual average for each gauge at the relevant measurement points. Our guide to air quality and dust monitoring by drone details this boundary between observation and metrology.

Measuring the stockyard: calibrated cones, bulk density and inventory

This is the heart of the matter. Products leave the plant as calibrated conical piles, one per grade : 0/4, 4/10, 20/40, washed sands, ballast, recycled aggregates. Those cones are precisely what a photogrammetric survey measures best. The flight runs as a grid (two crossed grids beat one), at constant height, with heavy overlap and oblique shots so no blind angle is left on steep flanks ; ground control points surveyed by GNSS and spread across the whole yard, or an RTK base, provide the georeferencing. Processing yields a point cloud, then a digital surface model. Each pile's volume then comes from the difference between that model and a base surface — and much of the reliability plays out right there : on a flat pad surveyed once while empty, the base is known ; on a pile backed against a bund or wedged against a concrete-block wall, the reference plane has to be defined explicitly, or backfill gets counted as finished product. The choice of flight height, hence of ground sampling distance (GSD), follows the same logic as on any topographic survey.

Two published works frame what the method is worth. Oluibukun Gbenga Ajayi and John Ajulo published in 2021, in the journal Quaestiones Geographicae, a comparison on a gravel pile between a drone survey (128 images at 50 m flight height) and a ground survey with a total station, both set against a reference volume taken from the crushing plant's own counter : 2,750 m³ reference, 2,686 m³ for the drone, 2,831 m³ for the total station, gaps of under 3 % either way (see the study on Google Scholar). More telling still for an aggregate yard, D. J. A. Davis and N. S. Guy published in 2023, in the International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, a comparison of terrestrial laser scanning, drone photogrammetry and total station on stockpiles of sand, gravel and finer aggregates : the total station survey proved workable only on sand and coarse aggregates, impractical on fine aggregates, and generally under-reported volumes ; the drone performed better at lower flight height with greater overlap (see the study on Google Scholar). That is exactly what operators complain about with ground surveys : you do not climb a 0/4 pile, you cannot walk properly on a flank at its angle of repose, and you end up measuring fewer points precisely where more are needed.

That leaves the step most often botched : going from volume to tonnage. The drone delivers cubic metres ; accounting, declarations and invoicing all think in tonnes. The conversion runs through bulk density, which must be measured grade by grade, not assumed. It varies with particle size, grain shape, rock type, how compacted the pile is and above all its moisture — a sand drained after a week of rain does not weigh what the same sand weighs in August. Measurement is done either by a standardised test (EN 1097-3, loose bulk density and voids), or, more simply on site, by weighing a load of known volume on the weighbridge, grade by grade, and repeating the exercise whenever conditions change. The order of magnitude for common aggregates sits around 1.4 to 1.8 t/m³ depending on material and state : a density guessed to within 10 % mechanically injects 10 % of error into the tonnage, wrecking a survey that was otherwise accurate to 2 %. Density is the leading source of error in a drone inventory, far ahead of photogrammetry.

As for uses, the value is first of all accounting. An end-of-year survey gives a dated stockyard inventory, defensible internally, pile by pile and grade by grade. Repeated quarterly on the same flight plan, it allows reconciliation between declared production, sales weighed on the weighbridge and physical stock : a persistent gap points either to a density drift, or to a counting problem, or to a grade running off into unsold fines. It usefully feeds the annual production file without ever replacing it — the weighbridge remains the only enforceable regulatory figure, as noted in our guide to drone stockpile and volume measurement. On inert-waste recycling platforms, the same survey tracks recycled material stocks awaiting sale, a figure few operators keep precisely even though it governs how much space is left on the platform.

Who commissions this kind of mission, limits, method and 2026 prices

These flights are commissioned by quarry operators and materials-processing sites, by hire firms and operators of mobile crushing units working short campaigns on site, by construction-and-demolition inert waste recycling platforms, by QSE and maintenance departments of aggregate groups, and by inspection bodies looking for a dated overview before a visit. Concrete batching plants on or near the same site fall under a different heading and a different stockpile exercise, covered in our guide to concrete batching plant inspection. Where the survey must produce a document enforceable against a third party — boundary setting, as-built plan, dispute — capture is subcontracted within the framework described in our guide to drones and land surveyors, the chartered professional remaining the one who signs.

The field limits are real and best stated up front. Abrasive dust attacks motors and optics : you do not fly low over a discharge point in full production, and a volume flight is best scheduled with the plant stopped or at the start of a shift. Vibration and noise complicate communication on the ground and call for clear rules between the pilot and the site foreman. Above all, moving machinery — dumpers, loaders, customer trucks circulating in the yard — demands genuine coordination : no flying over occupied cabs, the relevant zone stopped while the piles are flown, a take-off point well clear of the haul roads. A stockyard is measured far better in one hour of cleared zone than in three hours of slalom. As with any mission on an industrial site, the prevention plan is settled before the flight. And to say it once more : the drone replaces neither the statutory periodic inspections of work equipment required by the French labour code (articles R. 4323-23 and R. 4323-24, carried out by qualified persons), nor checks on safety devices — emergency stops, guards, lock-out — nor the regulatory measurement of dust deposition.

Ranges observed in France in 2026, excl. VAT:

A travel charge applies beyond a 30 to 50 km radius, and a mobile unit installed for only a few weeks requires scheduling flexibility that should be flagged early. These amounts cover the flight, processing and delivery of volumes and deliverables ; they exclude bulk density testing, deposit gauges and any statutory machine inspection. For a processing site, a recycling platform or a mobile-unit campaign, request a quote stating the number of piles and grades, the installed power and ICPE regime of the plant, and the goal (accounting inventory, maintenance survey or regulatory file).

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