Unical and sustainability
Roberto Bogliolo, Director of Ecology, Environment, and Safety, Buzzi Unicem Srl and Unical SpA
In recent years, the number of EPDs published on EPDItaly for ready-mixed concrete has grown significantly, driven by market demands increasingly focused on transparency and reliability of environmental data. A decisive contribution comes from the use of qualified LCA tools, which simplify the generation of declarations and ensure their technical consistency even across large product families.
To learn more about how these solutions are changing the approach of companies in the sector, we interviewed Roberto Bogliolo, Director of Ecology, Environment, and Safety at Buzzi Unicem Srl and Unical SpA, who told us how a customized LCA tool is becoming a strategic asset for efficiency, competitiveness, and the development of new product formulas.
What was the main driver that convinced Unical to invest in a customized tool for EPDItaly, and how does this project fit into your ESG roadmap and the group’s decarbonization goals?
Unical, as the leading concrete manufacturer in Italy, given market demands and the know-how gained from around 20 years of Environmental Product Declarations, decided to invest in a customized tool eight years ago for a number of strategic, economic, and operational reasons.
In particular, the tool allows even people with little expertise in LCA to develop a single LCA study of our concretes, starting from an important database relating to the production of Buzzi Unicem cements. The tool, which is periodically validated, restores credibility to the data from the entire supply chain, providing specific, detailed, transparent, and certified information that is made available to the end customer.
The new tool will enable you to perform environmental calculations in near real time: what benefits do you expect in terms of compliance with CAM, EU Taxonomy, or other green building protocols, and how will this benefit your customers?
Given the growing number of market requests and the amount of information needed to carry out an in-depth LCA study (to date, we use around 5,000 data inputs for our cements), the development of a tool has become more necessary than ever. Reducing the time required was therefore one of the factors that convinced us to invest in developing a tool capable of processing complex LCA studies, ensuring the simplification of data collection and processing. The tool therefore guarantees a significant reduction in the time required for the LCA study, while allowing us to focus our attention on processes with greater added value. In addition, the certification of Buzzi Unicem cements has also enabled us to establish an agreement with ICMQ for our customers, who will be able to reduce verification and certification times by taking advantage of the work already done by Buzzi Unicem.
Will the availability of certified metrics influence your sourcing or formulation choices? Can you give a concrete example of a decision that will be facilitated by the tool?
In 2025, the tool, initially created to produce Environmental Product Declarations, was updated with the addition of a “Research and Development” section that allows new products to be designed flexibly, providing an additional tool for predicting the environmental impacts associated with recipe changes.
In addition to quantifying the environmental aspects of products placed on the market, it is therefore also possible to simulate new recipes and formulations for possible products, allowing for equally accurate results. For example, starting from a product with a specific recipe, it will be possible to verify the change in impact by replacing one or more components (e.g., cement), while ensuring the same performance of the final product.