Enhancing data quality for robust life cycle assessment in refractory industry: strategies and implication

Moving towards a sustainable economy requires improving the environmental performance of materials and processes and implies being able to quantify it reliably and scientifically. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool to calculate the burdens generated by products or services on environmental domains represented by impact categories. The use of LCA in the refractory sector is relatively recent, indeed few studies have been conducted. By performing the LCA of magnesia and alumina production, this study intends to focus on the major effect of inventory data on the results representativeness, robustness and comparability. The case studies show that climate change, particulate matter (disease incidences) and fossil resources use are the most impacted environmental domains. The energy consumption is identified as the environmental hotspot generating most of the impacts. The conclusions are meant to support refractory makers towards a better understanding of data requirements to direct their effort for data collection, and to suggest eco-design solutions.