  Citation: Türkbay, T.; Laratte, B.; Çolak, A.; Çoruh, S.; Elevli, B. Life Cycle Assessment of Boron Industry from Mining to Refined Products. Sustainability 2022, 14, 1787. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su14031787 Academic Editors: Dmitriy Makarov and Vladimir Masloboev Received: 8 December 2021 Accepted: 31 January 2022 Published: 4 February 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). sustainability Article Life Cycle Assessment of Boron Industry from Mining to Refined Products Tu ˘ gçe Türkbay 1 , Bertrand Laratte 1,2,3,4, * , Ay¸ senur Çolak 2 , Semra Çoruh 5 and Birol Elevli 2 1 Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology, University of Bordeaux, CNRS, Bordeaux INP, INRAE, I2M Bordeaux, F-33400 Talence, France; tugce.turkbay@ensam.eu 2 Department of Industrial Engineering, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 55139, Turkey; 21280873@stu.omu.edu.tr (A.Ç.); birol.elevli@omu.edu.tr (B.E.) 3 APESA-Innovation, F-40220 Tarnos, France 4 French Institute of Anatolian Studies, CNRS USR 3131, Beyo ˘ glu, ˙ Istanbul 34433, Turkey 5 Department of Environmental Engineering, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 55139, Turkey; semcoruh@omu.edu.tr * Correspondence: bertrand.laratte@ensam.eu Abstract: Although there are a lot of studies in literature related to the life cycle assessment (LCA) of mining, there are only a few studies done on the boron mining industry. This paper presents an LCA of the boron mining industry including the extraction, beneficiation, and refinement processes. The main purpose is to identify and compare the environmental impacts associated with the production of 1 ton of refined products (boric acid, borax pentahydrate, borax decahydrate, and sodium perborate) starting from an open pit mine located in Turkey. The life cycle inventory (LCI) was obtained from the data collected from the related literature sources and the company’s reports. This cradle-to-gate analysis has been carried out using the commercial software called SimaPro employing the Inter- national Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) 2011 Midpoint+ Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) method. The results showed that the environmental impact of the refinement process is critical compared to the mining and beneficiations processes. Sulphuric acid, steam, hydrogen peroxide, and sodium perborate which are used in refined boron production cause most of the impact and emission into the environment. Among the refined boron products investigated, the impact of sodium perborate is quite high. Keywords: life cycle assessment; environmental impact; boron mining; colemanite; ulexite; tincal 1. Introduction The boron element has been used in a wide range of industries such as glass, ceramic, detergent, etc., and also in the agricultural field [1]. Boron is widely used in the glass industry to reduce thermal expansion, increase durability and chemical resistance, and provide resistance to vibration, high temperature, and thermal shock. In the ceramic industry, it is used to increase chemical, thermal, and wear resistance. Boron has been used as a laundry additive since the 1900s in the detergent and soap industry; it softens hard water by binding to the calcium ions in hard water. It is also used in the agricultural field as a micronutrient in fertilizers as it contributes to fruit and seed production [2]. A detailed table of boron uses is given in Table A1 [2–8]. The interest and demand for boron increased over time as a result of development in industrial activities and technologies [9]. It is then necessary to consider the impact of boron minerals on the environment in order to perform a life cycle assessment (LCA) of industrial products containing boron elements from cradle to gate. There are many LCA studies on mineral mining in the literature such as iron, lithium, manganese, uranium, gold, cobalt, etc. [10–15]. Nevertheless, there is a great lack of literature on the LCA of boron mining.The study by Azapagic and Clift (1999) [16] presented the results of the application Sustainability 2022, 14, 1787. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14031787 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability