## 1 Introduction  
Many people working in the demolition of buildings manufactured prior to the 1990s were exposed, during the different dismantling stages, to handling hazardous material like asbestos. The possibility to utilize fast and reliable \"on site\" detection methods able to assess the presence of asbestos thus assume great relevance. Asbestos fibers are fibrous silicate minerals, widely used in construction during the 20 th century due to their strong fire, chemical and abrasion resistance. Many hazardous exposures result from inadequacies to access information, to utilize appropriate measurement technologies and to use adequate personal protective equipment [1]. Until the1990s, Asbestos-Containing Materials (ACMs) (e.g., asbestos cement, Eternit, disc brake pads, etc.) were used in more than 3000 industrial applications and for manufacturing various types of products, due to their outstanding characteristics [2; 3]. Harmful asbestos minerals that are regulated by law include chrysotile, tremolite, crocidolite, anthophyllite, actinolite and amosite [4]. Asbestos fibers contained in the degraded products tend to exfoliate,liberating themselves from the embedding matrix, thus generating airborne particles. The breathing of these fibers can cause benign asbestos-related disorders, like asbestososis and pleural plaques [5] and malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM). MPM is a rare, aggressive tumor. It originates from the serosal cells lining the lungs and according to the World Health Organization (WHO), mesothelioma, asbestos-related lung cancer and asbestos globally cause 107,000 deaths annually [6]. Human health can be damaged by inhaling fibers when they become airborne due to weathering or human activities producing dust [7]. Nowadays, due to the adverse health effects associated with asbestos exposure, various laboratory techniques are used to characterize the occurrence of asbestos fibers in rock samples [8; 9; 10; 11], and different studies were carried out on asbestos identification using portable devices [12; 13]. Life cycle of buildings that have been constructed by asbestos containing materials (ACM) is reaching the renovation time, and their demolition waste will provide an enormous volume of asbestos containing waste (ACW) [14]. Directives of European Waste Catalogue, code 170605, classify all ACW as hazardous and requires its treatment prior to disposal in controlled landfills [15]. However, to minimize the amount of C&DW to be brought into the controlled landfills, it is necessary to characterize all demolition waste and separate the hazardous material from the inert material. The possibility to adopt fast and reliable analysis methods to a preliminary detection and identification of asbestos fibers, during the demolition or renovation of a building, is of great interest in terms of safety, time and costs. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) based systems are widely used in remote sensing (i.e., satellite, aerial platform and drones) to identify and map specific aspects of the territory, including the presence of hazardous materials, as the ACMs in rural, mountains, industrial and urban areas [16; 17]. Limitations for ACMs mapping using HSI include lack of suitable spectral libraries for urban materials, presence of shadows, non-roof coverage elements and spectral similarities [18; 19]. The use of in situ techniques based on HSI could represent a useful tool for the identification of materials and/or products containing asbestos fibers. In this work, HSI was applied to classify ACMs at laboratory scale, according to the promising results obtained in our previous studies [11; 20; 21; 22]. Differently from our previous studies, in this paper efforts have been addressed not to identify the presence of specific asbestos minerals, but to detect the presence of ACM, that is \"individuals\" constituted by a matrix embedding asbestos fibers. To our knowledge, no other studies are published on the utilization of HSI for asbestos and ACMs classification inside C&DW waste at laboratory scale.