Environmental Load Assessment of Alumina during Its Life Cycle Manufacturing Chain

This paper describes a complete set of environmental load assessment index of resource depletion, energy consumption and environmental discharges for alumina and presents the mathematical model for calculating environmental load of alumina during its whole manufacturing process chain. To demonstrate the method, a case study comparing the environmental load of alumina during its whole Bayer manufacturing process with two methods of caldron digestion and tube digestion is presented, and the load information on final product of alumina as well as intermediate product are also obtained simultaneously to support the effective identification and subsequent improvement of the aspects in those processes of digestion, precipitation, evaporation, aluminium trihydrate calcining that contribute the significant loads.