Life Cycle Assessment of Refractory Materials: Using Environmental Data to Enhance Production Routes and Product Design for Sustainability

The growing severity of global environmental challenges, such as climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss, has made environmental sustainability a key component of decision-making. Regulatory requirements and the rising demand for sustainable products are prompting the refractory industry to integrate environmental performance into product design. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a key methodology used to measure this performance across various impact categories.. In the present work, LCA is applied to calcined alumina and alumina block production to quantify the current environmental burdens and to provide eco-design suggestions. First, the processes that significantly affect the most impacted environmental domains are identified for both products. Then, sustainable actions are proposed and tested through scenario analysis. Under the modelling assumptions, fuel consumption drives the impacts of calcined alumina production, which subsequently accounts for the majority of the environmental burdens associated with block production.