Research On Environmental Impact Of Sintered Brick Production In China

As an important building material of the infrastructure construction, sintered bricks are at a wide range of production and use of our country. However, the brick manufacturing process consumes a large amount of natural resources and energy, and generates substantial waste; finally result in a significant impact on the environment. Compared with the status above, our country presently failed to conduct a systematic evaluation of the impact, and is lack of accurate reorganizations on the environmental load of sintered brick industry.In view of this situation, this paper applied an important environmental management tool——life cycle assessment methods (Life Cycle Assessment, LCA) to carry out environmental impact assessment for common sintered brick, which account for approximately 70% of sintered brick production in the country. The results showed that non-renewable resource consumption (ADP) act as the most serious category of environmental impact throughout the production process, followed by the greenhouse effect (GWP), acidification of the environment (AP), damage to human health (HT) and photochemical smog (POCP).Subsequently, the paper carried on environmental impact assessment onto hollow brick sintered, which is another important product of sintered brick industry. And on the basis of which, comparison of production environmental burden was made between common sintered brick and hollow brick. By the results, same as common sintered brick production, in the five environment burdens of hollow brick production, ADP is the most important category, followed by GWP, AP, HT and POCP. Through analysis and comparison, the environmental impact of hollow brick production is less than common sintered brick. Because of the existence of empty rates in hollow brick, its production could save a lot of the natural clay resources and fossil fuels and reduce CO2, SO2 and other harmful gases.In the theses, environmental load on sintering process of brick production was calculated among different production technology and various production scales, the results were then analyzed. The results show that, for different technology (Kiln type) of sintered brick production, the results were basically the same as long as they used similar raw materials and fuel consumption. But for the different production companies in terms of scale, environmental load of large scale production line was significantly less than the production line of small scale.Finally, research on non-renewable resources depletion was carried out. During the LCA process, the use of traditional equivalent of antimony or iron of non-renewable resources will affect the result of depletion of the accuracy and objectivity. Therefore, with common building materials as a platform, using CML method, article took study on silicon equivalent. The results were compared between different equivalents of Si equivalent and Fe equivalent and showed that: when silicon equivalent was on the application for ADP assessment.