Critical reviews and benchmarking Tunisian clinker and cement with life cycle assessment results

Abstract

Clinker and cement production is an energy-intensive and high resource requirement industry with significant environmental impacts, and yet, there is a dearth of environmental research in Tunisia on its Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Additionally, there is a tendency either to overlook or underestimate the selection of appropriate life cycle impact assessment methods. This study aims to address these issues by conducting a comprehensive LCA of Tunisian cement production with the goal of analyzing and comparing the results using various methods and benchmarking against existing literature. Three different Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods, including IMPACT 2002+, CML (baseline), and ReCiPe Midpoint (2008–2016) (H), were used. These methods were chosen for their different coverage (regional/global) of their impact categories, leading to a more comprehensive comparison of the performance of clinker and cement to the literature. In addition, the similarity with published values demonstrates reliability for LCA results, except ionizing radiation, ozone layer depletion, and respiratory organics in IMPACT 2002+ for clinker, CEM-I, and CEM-II; fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity and marine aquatic ecotoxicity in CML (baseline) for CEM-I; and photochemical oxidant formation: ecosystem quality and human health in ReCiPe for CEM-I. This low variability with the reported values in the literature suggests the capability of using the benchmarking approach as a proxy in a context of lack of data.