1741 hazardous). This leads to the emission of pollutants into the air, water, and soil, affecting the environment. Several studies have quantified the emissions and the resulting environmental impacts from aggregates production. For example, a study by Stripple (2001) quantified Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions originating from the cradle-to-gate aggregate production system boundary (which includes operations such as rock material extraction, material handling, and production processes). For instance, CO2 and CH4 emissions were estimated at 1.42 kg and 3.82E-03 kg per tonne of aggregates (Stripple, 2001). Several studies have addressed the environmental impacts of GHG emissions. For instance, a study by Rosado et al. (2017) used Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to quantify the cradle-to-gate impact of GHG emissions at 2.01 kg CO2eq per tonne of aggregates produced from a Brazilian quarry. Furthermore, their study identified that the majority of the impact was attributed to blasting. A study by Martinez-Arguelles et al. (2019) estimated the cradle-to-gate impact of producing 1 tonne of aggregates from a quarry in the northern region of Colombia to be 35.58 kg CO2eq and highlighted that diesel consumption was the major contributor. Another study by de Bortoli (2023) conducted an LCA of multiple Canadian quarries and found explosives and diesel consumption to be the primary impact drivers. From the literature, it can be inferred that the predominant source of CO2 emissions and environmental impact often depends on site characteristics. In addition to CO2 emissions and their impact, dust emissions, especially diffused dust, including Total Suspended Particles (TSP) and Particulate Matter (PM), remain one of the most important issues in aggregates production (Sirina-Leboine et al., 2025). This is further corroborated by existing literature; for example, a literature review conducted by Lee et al. (2024) to identify relevant environmental impacts associated with quarries revealed that dust emissions were among the primary topics of focus within the studies considered for the review. Furthermore, within the EU's entire extractive sector, the fine PM emissions (<2.5 µm) mostly originate from the quarrying and mining operations (European Environment Agency, 2025). To monitor and reduce emissions in the EU, regulations have been put in place. For instance, the Industrial Emissions Portal Regulation (EU) 2024/1244 (IEPR) requires large production facilities, including large opencast mining and quarrying facilities within the EU, to report the emissions into air, water, and soil that can be harmful to the environment or to human health at a facility-level (European Union, 2024). In addition to regulations, there is a growing demand in the construction sector to quantify the environmental impacts of emissions from aggregate production, driven by climate objectives, sustainability commitments, and growing transparency requirements along the value chain. As aggregates are an important part of concrete and asphalt products, as well as structural unbound materials (UEPG, 2021), there is a growing demand to quantify the product-level environmental impacts of aggregates. Methods such as Direct Air Emission (DAE) estimation and LCA can be used to estimate emissions and quantify environmental impacts, respectively. The DAE method, improved during the ROTATE project, enables the estimation of diffuse and stuck dust emissions, air emissions from fuel consumption in non-road mobile machinery (NRMM), and from explosive use (Sirina-Leboine et al., 2025). LCA is a systematic, iterative, and comprehensive method that can estimate environmental impact by considering all stages of a product's lifecycle, from extraction of raw materials through transportation, production, use, recycling, and final disposal (Baumann & Tillman, 2004). For aggregates producers, it can be challenging to understand the intended purposes of the two methods, their differences, and the data requirements to implement them. In this work, a case study has been developed for a quarrying site located in Europe, where both DAE and LCA methods have been used to estimate site-specific air emissions and product-level environmental impacts. The aim of this work is to compare the results obtained from the two methods and is guided by the research question: What are the differences between the DAE estimation and LCA methods? 2. METHODOLOGY This section describes the two methods used in this study: DAE estimation and LCA. In addition, the section describes the common basis used in the study when applying the two methods to enable comparison.
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