Application Of Production Simulation Combined With Site-Specific Data To Quantify The Environmental Performance Of Aggregate Products At Five Pilot Sites

Paper in proceeding, 2024

Quantification of environmental performance is becoming a frequent request from downstream customers in the construction sector. Often, this information is provided through conducting a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) where the results are used for communication purposes in the form of an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). This misses an opportunity to use the LCA results for internal improvements to the production system from an environmental perspective. One way to increase the value of these LCA activities for aggregate producers is to connect the LCA to quarry operation simulations, allowing estimation of where environmental impacts occur in the process. Within the EU Horizon 2020 project, DigiEcoQuarry, work is being conducted to explore the improvement capabilities that digitalisation in the production process can bring for quarries across Europe. As part of this work, an industry-specific, online platform tool has been further developed and applied to five pilot sites to capture the environmental performance of the aggregates produced, connected to tailored simulation models of the plants. The simulation model helps capture the unique conditions at each pilot site and is complemented by real data on the site-specific consumption and production for one year to provide estimates of environmental performance across multiple environmental impact categories. The tool has now been applied at all five pilot sites in the project for the base year of 2019. The results illustrate the differences in performance created by the unique conditions at each site and highlight potential areas of improvement for the producers.