query: Can you mine clay?
passage: Clay pit
A clay pit is a quarry or mine for the extraction of clay, which is generally used for manufacturing pottery, bricks or Portland cement. Quarries where clay is mined to make bricks are sometimes called brick pits.[1]
passage: Soil
Due to its high specific surface area and its unbalanced negative electric charges, clay is the most active mineral component of soil. It is a colloidal and most often a crystalline material. In soils, clay is a soil textural class and is defined in a physical sense as any mineral particle less than in effective diameter. Many soil minerals, such as gypsum, carbonates, or quartz, are small enough to be classified as clay based on their physical size, but chemically they do not afford the same utility as do mineralogically-defined clay minerals. Chemically, clay minerals are a range of phyllosilicate minerals with certain reactive properties.