COMPARISON OF LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT TOOLS IN CEMENT PRODUCTION

The cement industry is known to be the largest consumer of energy and natural resources. Globally, an average of a ton of cement is needed by every individual each year. Cement, being the major constituent of concrete, is the most manufactured and most consumed product, and its environmental impact continuously increases; this in turn causes climate change and global warming. This has stimulated the quest to understand the environmental implications of the cement industry through life cycle assessment. The need to review life cycle assessment (LCA) software that is available for cement production is thus germane, as the desired output to be obtained in an LCA largely depends on the choice of the software package to be used. Of the 45 LCA software tools reviewed, we report on a comparison of four suitable and prominent software packages — GaBi, OpenLCA, SimaPro, and Umberto — for the cement industry. From our analysis, SimaPro emerged as the best software tool for the cement industry, based on the required standards. However, every user knows what is required in a tool; thus this paper helps to link the desired output to a particular software tool.