Towards implementation of a life cycle perspective for aggregate production

Research Project, 2018

Aggregates from crushed rock is one of Sweden´s heaviest industrial products with its 100 million tonnes per year. Despite today´s ability to accurately calculate energy and emissions for these large volumes, it is not transparent what is going on, either from an environmental impact or a technical perspective. Customers, consultants and producers themselves (!) do not have full control. Our vision is a commonly used tool that links the actual production chain of rock materials with sound models. This gives both producers and society a common and accepted way of communicating environmental impact. This continues because manufacturers and customers will affect manufacturing processes and the products’ use in a measurable manner. The goal of the project in step 2 is to develop a functional demonstrator of the tool, where different stakeholders can log in and get their relevant information; the customer get a pre-certified LCA declaration, the municipality gets a summary of the environmental impact for next month for all quarries in the municipality, the private customer gets a comparison of different producers´ products, including transport, and the site manager at the crushing plant receives a recipe for optimal production from both environmental and productivity perspectives. In step 1 we will investigate how the tool will be developed and eventually operated in the future. We will continue to include more partners to the constellation to get pilots to our demonstrator. In addition, we need to determine an appropriate mode of operation for the tool. At the plant level, the rock materials industry is overrepresented by men. In step 1, we need to investigate how the tool can be designed and implemented to attract more women to the industry.