Environmental evaluation of the production of aggregates in quarries - Indicators, Models and Tools.

Natural aggregates, second raw material consumed in France, are elaborated starting from rock, non-renewable resource. The awakening of the importance to protect the environment and the impacts associated with the production of manufactured goods, supports the development of methods intended for better approaching the impact of their production. In this context, this work deals with the environmental evaluation of industrial quarry explotations. It is based on a data acquisition of sites useful to this evaluation, followed by the realization of a global assessment model of energy consumption, atmospheric emissions and sound levels generated during the elaboration of aggregates. This model, based on indicators, is designed to be skeletal depending on the petrographic nature of the site (loose or massive rock). The set up of an assessment tool, named CADUR (CArrière DURable, sustainable quarry in French) allows i) to obtain environmental data related to the production of natural aggregates ; ii) to highlight that the dominant parameter of quarry evaluation is the configuration of the exploitation itself ; iii) for the producer, to flow the evolution of these performances, to include/understand the reasons and to quantify the effect of potential modifications. According to the data of the sites collected, the results provided by CADUR offer quite a good precision. They show variations, with the real data, lower than 10% for energy consumptions and 5% concerning the noise levels.