A Life-Cycle Assessment of Portland Cement manufacturing: Comparing the Traditional

Process with Alternative Technologies

A research made by Deborah N. Huntzinger and Thomas Eatmon, they are concern over
the impact of anthropogenic carbon emissions on the global climate due to growth in global
warming awareness. According to their research, 5% of Global Carbon Dioxide emissions came
from cement manufacturing plants, the 3rd largest in United States. This research used LCA or
Life-Cycle Assessment to evaluate the environmental impact of four manufacturing process, 1 st
is the production of traditional Portland cement, 2nd is blended cement, 3rd is cement where 100%
of waste cement kiln dust is recycled into the kiln process and 4th is Portland cement produced
when cement kiln dust is used to sequester a portion of the process related to carbon dioxide
emissions. They use a software named SimaPro 6.0 that shows blended cements provide the
greatest environmental savings followed by utilization of cement kiln dust for sequestration. It
shows that recycling cement kiln dust can have a little environmental savings over the traditional
process. Heavy metals and acidification has a high impact scores and this is believed to be cause
of artifact types of fuels selected in the incomplete representation of chemical interactions
occurring in a kiln. Pacifying sources of anthropogenic carbon emission will help to lower
greenhouse gas levels globally. Environmental life-cycle assessment is a valuable tool for
understanding the environmental hazards of products and for optimizing the manufacturing
process to reduce adverse environmental impacts. The results of LCA shows that blended
cements provide the greatest environmental savings, the reduction. The utilization of CKD for
sequestration emerge to offer a means to reduce carbon emissions and a reduction in cement’s
environmental impact score of roughly 5% over the traditional Portland cement.