Abstract:
Cement production process is an important technology that contributes nation’s development but it is one of the major causes for global emissions such as NO2, SO2, Particulates and CO2 to result an adverse environmental impact. Currently most cement industries have already applied technologies aiming to reduce their emission footprint; namely clinker substituted cement types, exploiting alternative fuels and optimizing the cement manufacturing process designs. In this research, a detail Life cycle assessment study was applied on Derba Midrok Cement factory located 70km away from Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Derba Midrok cement plant is installed with highly efficient emission controlling equipment like Electro static precipitator and most of raw material transportation is via a covered conveyer belt. LCA is a tool which can be used to quantify and assess the environmental impacts of products or services for a given scope. As per the scope of this Life cycle assessment, cradle to gate approach has been considered and a functional unit of one ton of cement production was chosen. After applying the two models which are included in the openLCA software, the result shows that the quarry section is the leading source of emissions and resulting high Ozone layer depletion (1.40E-07kg R11 eq.), eco-toxicity (4.21E-06 kg DCB eq.) and photochemical oxidation. The major life cycle impacts of the raw meal preparation section are acidification (2.73E-02 kg SO2 eq.) and Eutrophication (5.04E-03 kgPO3). Moreover, the major lifecycle impacts of pyro-processing section in DMC are human toxicity (0.046 DCB eq.) and global warming potential (4.29E+05kg CO2) due to calcination and the cement kiln dust. Compared to similar studies of cement production plants the pollution contribution of Derba Midrok Cement plant is too lower with the exception that a global warming potential is relatively high because of calcination of highly consumed limestone.