167 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? 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. 2.1 DIRECT AIR EMISSIONS METHOD Emissions such as diffused dust (TSP, including TSP, including PM10 (<10 μm in size), and PM2.5 (<2.5 μm in size)), carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), methane (CH4), carbon monoxide (CO), and several heavy metals (Sirina-Leboine et al., 2025) are released into the air during aggregate production. Well-established methods exist to estimate emissions from the main sources at quarries at the EU's regional level. For instance, the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) provides guidebooks for estimating air emissions from various operations in aggregate production. These guidebooks provide the method and Emission Factors (EFs) for estimating diffuse dust emissions (TSP, PM10, and PM2.5) (European Environment Agency, 2023a), and for estimating fuel-combustion emissions from NRMM (European Environment Agency, 2023b). The EMEP/EEA guidebooks include three tiers of methods for estimating emissions, and they are differentiated based on their complexity and
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