Borate is an essential material to numerous industries and even to individual countries’ economies, defense, and politics. Almost all industries need borates for production, and almost everybody needs their products. Borate is a compound that contains or supplies boric oxide (B₂O₃). Among the minerals that contain boric oxide, there are only four minerals significant from an economic standpoint, namely borax (tincal), colemanite, ulexite, and kernite. Turkey has almost 70% of all known reserves in the world. Therefore, borates and their products could be one of the main topics for sustainable development in the whole world. The recent development and pursuit of new boron-consuming technologies and alternative products to existing borate-consuming products introduce additional uncertainty to the sustainability of boron minerals. Therefore, the European Union (EU) Commission also declared borate one of the 30 critical raw materials. Turkey is a prosperous country in terms of boron reserves, and it exports almost 96% of borates’ production. In order to better understand the relation between borate minerals and borate products, a material flow analysis (MFA) study has been carried out within the content of this work in order to update the data about the current status of boron. For this purpose, a system has been established that shows the flow of boron material. The extraction, enrichment, and refining processes of boron products are drawn. The results indicate that about 41% of extracted colemanite ore is converted into refined borate, about 31% of tincal ore is converted to refined borate, and 4% of tincal ore is converted to end-usage products, such as detergent. The correctness of the data and the sensitivity of the processes are all estimated values. The results can help in the development of boron sustainability and boron production strategies. The MFA study on tincal and colemanite ore may be an example of boron studies in different countries.

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 International 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.

More and more efforts are directed towards the standardization of the methods of determining the functional unit (FU) in a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). These efforts concern the development of theories and detailed methodological guides, but also the evaluation of the quality of the FU obtained. The objective of this article is to review this work in order to propose, using a multiscale approach, a method for defining the FU in the mining sector, which takes into account all the dimensions of the system under study. In this first part, the emphasis is on identifying the shortcomings of the FU. The absence of a precise normative framework specific to each sector of activity, as well as the complex, multifunctional and hard-to-scale nature of the systems concerned, are at the origin of the flexibility in the selection of the FU. This lack of a framework, beyond generating a heterogeneous definition of the FU for the same system, most often leads to an incomplete formulation of this sensitive concept of LCA. It has been found that key parameters such as the end-use of a product or process, as well as the interests of stakeholders, are hardly taken into account in the specification of the FU.

The risk of resource depletion for future generations of humanity is often cited as an important issue. The choice of impact categories and characterization models for resource extraction in LCA is no more precise than other impact categories and models. This means that more discussion is needed on the use of resources. In this article, the potential depletion of Boron and Boron minerals (Colemanite, Ulexite, Tincal) are studied. These minerals have a big role for the world and for Turkey; however, this resource is limited. Using the life cycle assessment methodology, one can estimate the resource depletion through the indicator “abiotic resource depletion”. Several models can evaluate this indicator, but the most used models are ReCiPe and CML (that is the previous attempt of ReCiPe) methods. Here, we estimated the damage that is done to natural resource scarcity. The values that are calculated by these two methods were compared to identify the potential evolution of the model and to observe the gap between these two models. The ReCiPe method refers to the average amount of extra ore that is produced in the future to extract 1 kg of boron ore or boron minerals resource. On the other hand, The CML method depends on the final reserve amount in terms of depletion. The results show no depletion shortly for boron ore and boron minerals. Correlation coefficients were calculated in the ReCiPe method, and ‘high uncertainty’ was estimated since R² < 0.8. This research highlights the fact that there is the necessity to propose different impact factors for the various minerals and not only for boron (that is done today).