Production Chains of Soft-Weak Stones: Life Cycle Inventory of Techniques and Technologies

The dimension stone sector is more and more active in developing new solutions to improve the sustainability of its supply chain, partly as a consequence of the current EU policies on Circular Economy and Raw Materials. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a recognized scientific tool for evaluating environmental impacts of the processes. Nevertheless, in the stone sector, LCA is hindered by the scarce availability of Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) datasets for the specific processes of the stone supply chain. This paper provides LCI datasets of the most common and widespread techniques and related technologies for quarrying, cutting and finishing soft-weak stones. To this aim primary data were collected in Italian marble quarries and processing plants and in companies producing cutting tools. When necessary, industry data were complemented with secondary data from literature. High replicability and flexibility of the datasets is obtained through the provision of Unit process inventories for each technology/technique and through the set of parameters. In addition, the uncertainty of the resulting LCI datasets has been evaluated with the well-established procedure of Ecoinvent pedigree matrix. The availability of these datasets contributes to the population of Life Cycle databases and is expected to boost the measurement and enhancement of the key aspects of sustainability in the stone sector.