Life Cycle Inventory of Brazilian Natural Stones

Abstract

Brazil is one of the main producers and exporters of natural stones in the world. Aiming to contribute to environmental improvements, the life cycle inventory of Brazilian natural stones – LCI Stones was elaborated. This paper presents the results obtained along the LCI Stones project. The project was carried out according to the Brazilian methodology for the elaboration of inventories and to the 14040 and 14044 ISO standards. The study consists of two product systems: quarrying and processing (which is divided in two other subsystems: sawing and polishing), being the last one the main system of this study. The product considered is the polished slab. The data were collected within producing companies, comprising a representative time period for the inventory validation. All inputs and outputs of mass, water and energy as well as products and emissions, within the boundaries, were identified and quantified. The main difficulty found in the data collection was the lack of data control by the companies, mainly the water and energy consumption and polishing inputs. The results of the study showed that, among the stone production processes, gang saw cutting was the one with the most relevant impacts. On account of the rapid technological improvements during the last years, the LCI-Stones is being updated by CETEM.

The relevance of cut-stone to strategies for low-carbon buildings

“…At the quarry level, representative life cycle inventory (LCI) datasets have been gathered for several settings, including the US (UT 2009), the UK (Crishna et al 2011), Brazil (Gadioli et al 2012) and Italy (Bianco & Blengini 2019), revealing that fossil-fuel use during the quarrying, cutting and finishing phases are the major contributors to their primary impact. While several sectoral sustainability aspects were addressed in these studies, systemic studies were prevented because LCI datasets are typically context specific and therefore inapplicable to other supply chains.…”

Production Chains of Soft-Weak Stones: Life Cycle Inventory of Techniques and Technologies

“…Also in other countries, sustainability assessments of stone companies were developed, despite some simplifications were necessarily introduced to overcome the scarce availability of data in LC databases [5][6][7][8][9]. While the cited researches mainly aimed at evaluating the sustainability of specific stone production chains, another, more global, approach has been followed by the Brazilian research group of CETEM (Centro de Tecnologia Mineral) [11], which developed (and is currently updating) a Life Cycle Inventory of the average production of stone slabs in Brazilian companies. However, because of different geographical, climate, economic and regulatory contexts, these data could be not enough representative for the Italian and European sector.…”

“…However, because of different geographical, climate, economic and regulatory contexts, these data could be not enough representative for the Italian and European sector. Mendoza et al [11,12] provided data on techniques for granite production, with reference to region of Galicia (Spain) in year 2010. Similarly, Bai et al [14] developed data on granite cutting techniques commonly used in the Shandong Province (China).…”

“…Similarly, Bai et al [14] developed data on granite cutting techniques commonly used in the Shandong Province (China). These latter studies [11][12][13][14] are valuable starting points, especially from the methodological point of view. However, their contributions can still be enlarged with datasets of other techniques (e.g.…”