In the past many serious industrial accidents with casualties as well as massive property damage were caused by the ignition of explosive mixtures of dust and air. In addition to areas with naturally occurring high dust concentrations, like the inside of filtration devices or elevators, dust deposits pose a significant risk. These dust deposits may rise due to primary explosions which can lead to a chain reaction resulting in the propagation of the explosion throughout wide areas of the plant. Basically every dust/air mixture formed by combustible material with a certain particle size at a certain dust concentration is explosive in the presence of an adequate ignition source. On this account the hazard regarding explosions originating from dusts at waste-treating and -recycling plants is not to be neglected. Because there is hardly any data for this branch of industry the thesis at hand addresses the quantification of the explosibility of different dusts from mechanical waste treatment plants. A safety-related characterisation is carried out in order to assess if a certain dust forms an explosive atmosphere when mixed with air and which conditions are to be met for this to happen. In this paper the characterisation is achieved by determination of the safety-related parameters maximum pressure of explosion, maximum rise in explosion pressure, minimum ignition energy and lower explosion limit. Based on these parameters questions concerning the risk of an explosion can be answered and appropriate protective measures may be taken. The literature research is the basis for the determination of the safety-related parameters in the laboratory. The legal obligations of plant operators as well as the theoretical background of the safety-related parameters are summarized. Furthermore data serving as reference values for the test results is researched. The determined parameters imply that the examined samples will only show a light reaction so that they are to be assigned to the lowest dust explosion class. Also the lower explosion levels as well as the miniumum ignition energies are comparatively high. This is partly because of a high percentage of inert anorganic material and partly due to relatively high mean particle sizes. Future studies should focus on determining how other factors like chemical composition and grain shape are influencing the explosion behavior. The goal is to provide a large number of test results and link them to the properties of the dust so that a theoretical estimation of the explosiblility is possible.