Environmental footprint assessment of China's ceramic tile production from energy-carbon-water nexus insight

For the pressure of industrial activities on energy, carbon, and water, their sustainable management has been receiving increasing attention. This study conduct an impact-oriented environmental footprint assessment of one industrial activity (i.e., ceramic tile) under a life cycle assessment framework and energy-carbon-water nexus insight. Moreover, key factors exploration, nexus characteristics, and optimization pathway analysis are applied. Results showed that damage from energy, carbon, and water footprints on human health, ecosystem quality, and resources during 1 m² ceramic tile production was 1.25 × 10⁻⁵-1.63 × 10⁻⁵ DALY, 1.05 × 10⁻⁷-4.61 × 10⁻⁷ Species*yr, and 0.79–1.23 $, respectively. The carbon, water degradation (especially freshwater ecotoxicity), and energy footprints dominated the damage on the aforementioned protection targets, respectively. Furthermore, the embodied impacts from soil and air pollutant emissions provided more than 40% contribution for water degradation footprint. Direct processes played significant roles in the carbon (38.5%), acidification (61.1%), and water scarcity (28.3%) footprints, whereas other categories were dominated by the impact in the supply chain, including electricity generation, transportation, glaze production, coal mining, and solid waste disposal. Nexus analysis also showed that optimizing the energy system is the most urgent. In addition to a reasonable consumption of the aforementioned inputs, adopting clean energy and transportation (e.g., natural gas, hydropower, and shipping) and reducing CO₂, methane, and heavy metals emissions are necessary. Additionally, the coal-to-gas policy needs a gradual and selective process, and it should choose preferential industries and boilers and ensure stable supply and reasonable prices.