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The life cycle environmental impacts of widely used flue-gas cleaning processes, including limestone-gypsum wet flue-gas desulfurization (FGD), selective catalytic reduction denitration (SCR) and electrostatic precipitators (ESP), are compared. The abbreviations FGD, SCR and ESP in this article refer in particular to the above listed processes. Energy consumption, resource consumption and emission inventories of each life cycle phase are established. The potentials of five environmental impact categories, namely, global warming, acidification, nutrient enrichment, photochemical ozone formation, soot and ashes are finally obtained. The current paper reveals that the total energy consumption and resource consumption are dominated by the process operation. The three processes are compared and it is found that to achieve equal environmental burden reductions, the SCR process consumes more energy and approximately the same amount of air and inert rock as the FGD. But the water consumption of the FGD is much higher than the SCR. The ESP process consumes both the least energy and the least resource in general. The economic assessment indicates that the performance of the ESP process tends to be the best and the FGD follows when equally invested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]