Life Cycle Assessment of Marble Plate Production

Sustainable use of natural resources in the production of construction materials has become a necessity both in Europe and Turkey. Marble plate is a construction material that is frequently preferred because of its neutrality and durability for a long time. Beside these technical specifications, its environmental performance should also be considered. From this point of view, it was aimed to investigate environmental impacts generated from marble plate production by using Life Cycle Assessment methodology. The functional unit was determined as to be 1 m 2 of marble plate. Foreground data were obtained from a marble production plant which has a quarry in Bilecik city and background data was gathered from Ecoinvent database. The CML-IA method included in the SimaPro 8.2.0 software was used to calculate environmental impact categories. Results showed that marble quarry (the unprocessed product before the marble plate) and electricity are the main contributors to the environmental effects of the marble plate. For marble quarry, the effects of diesel and electricity are significant. Abiotic depletion potential, global warming potential, and human toxicity potential were the main environmental loads of the marble plate production. The sensitivity of the results was determined by using the data obtained from ELCD database in addition to Ecoinvent and it was seen that there is no so much difference between the results obtained by using two different databases. Additionally, environmental performance of the marble plate was compared to the ceramic tile since they are both floor covering materials and alternatives of each other. This comparison showed that fossil fuel-based abiotic depletion potential of marble plate (24.7 MJ) was higher than fossil fuel-based abiotic depletion potential of ceramic tile (0.935 MJ).  On the other hand, GWP and HTP values of the ceramic tile (7.97 kg CO 2 eq. and 1.17 kg 1,4-DB eq., respectively) is greater than GWP and HTP values of the marble plate (3.96 kg CO 2 eq. and 0.554 kg 1,4-DB eq., respectively).