Bayesian material flow analysis and life cycle assessment reveal decarbonisation and land use trade-off in England's cement and concrete sector

Concrete is essential for modern infrastructure, but its production has significant environmental costs, including carbon emissions and land use. Comprehensive material life cycle data for cement and concrete are currently lacking, hindering assessment of its life cycle environmental impacts and strategies for mitigative action including policy decisions. This study applies Bayesian Material Flow Analysis (BaMFA) for the quantitative material flow analysis of the 2019 cement and concrete life cycle in England. Integrating the BaMFA results – estimates of material flows and stocks – into Life Cycle Assessment enables more complete assessment of the material system's potential life cycle impacts. This study has two aims. First, to establish the first quantitative material life cycle for cement and concrete in England; second, to demonstrate the potential of BaMFA in strategic material assessment. The modelled system has a global warming potential of 17.0MtCO2-eq, 2.6% of the reported 2019 UK total. Including land use (239km2a crop-eq, 0.1% of England's land area) highlights difficulties of achieving improvements concurrently across them. Priority actions for decarbonisation alongside land use reduction is clinker substitution in cement manufacturing and reduced coal use in steelmaking. Greater attention should also be paid to reducing impacts related to transport, which contributes 1.34 Mt CO2-eq and 54.5% of land use in the system, especially where interventions affect logistics and infrastructure needs. Data availability is a persistent barrier to informed policy and decision-making, including decarbonisation for net-zero, and system optimisation through modelling. BaMFA can help to estimate incomplete or absent data in any complex material systems.