EUBA

In 1999, the European bentonite producers established their representation at the EU level through European Bentonite Association (EUBA) and became members of Industrial Minerals Association Europe (IMA-Europe). By 2020, the scope of the association expanded to include other sorptive clays such as attapulgite and sepiolite in its activities.

EUBA is a non-profit association whose members cooperate on scientific and legislative issues of common interest related to sorptive clays (bentonite, attapulgite and sepiolite). Key aspects are those related to the environment, economic and social conditions, notably concerning health and safety, the improvement of occupational health conditions, the harmonisation of standards for sorptive clays products.

EUBA is a comprehensive source of information for all issues relevant to the sorptive clays industry, except for matters that might affect the free competition amongst its members.

In the frame of this cooperation, EuBA back in 2020 defined the scope to revise its EuBA Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) project scope and based on market developments and needs developed three LCI’s instead of two from the first exercise.

Despite the interest by some EuBA member companies in developing LCI of Sepiolite and Attapulgite, the insufficient number of (interested) companies made it impossible to develop this project within the association and ensure that the confidentiality of the reporting companies was assured.

Therefore, in absence of LCI data for Sepiolite and Attapulgite as such and knowing that the process of extracting and processing these products is very similar to Bentonite, we can invite the interested companies to make use of the bentonite LCI data developed by EuBA for the three products below to calculate their environmental impacts accordingly:

1: Bentonite Powder

2: Bentonite Unprocessed

3: Bentonite Granular

These three EuBA inventories are freely available from the Secretariat: a.shtiza@ima-europe.eu or from the companies you have a business relation with.