Life Cycle Assessment of Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) Using both Problem Oriented (Midpoint) Approach and Damage Oriented Approach (Endpoint)

Busola D. Olagunju and Oludolapo Olanrewaju

A chapter in Product Life Cycle - Opportunities for Digital and Sustainable Transformation from IntechOpen

Abstract: The concern for environmental related impacts of the cement industry is fast growing in recent times. The industry is challenged with high environmental impact which spans through the entire production process. Life cycle assessment (LCA) evaluates the environmental impact of product or process throughout the cycle of production. This can be done using either or both midpoint (process-oriented) and endpoint (damage-oriented) approaches of life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). This study assessed the environmental impact of 1 kg Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) using both approaches of LCIA. This analysis was carried out using a data modeled after the rest of the world other than China, India, Europe, US and Switzerland. The dataset was taken from Ecoinvent database incorporated in the SimaPro 9.0.49 software. The result of the analysis showed that clinker production phase produced the highest impact and CO2 is the highest pollutant emitter at both endpoint and midpoint approaches. This is responsible for global warming known to affect both human health and the ecosystem. Also, toxicity in form of emission of high copper affects the ecosystem as well as humans. In addition, high fossil resources (crude oil) are consumed and pose the possibility for scarcity.

Keywords: Ordinary Portland cement (OPC); Environmental impact; LCA; LCIA; Midpoint; End point (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/77062 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:237054

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.98398

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from IntechOpen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Slobodan Momcilovic ().