A Methodology for Sustainable Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design

Roads cause significant impacts on the environment, such as contributing to emissions responsible for climate change. For this reason, pavement design methodology should integrate environmental as well as economical impacts. The objective of this study was to incorporate environmental impacts as part of the Mechanistic-Empirical (ME) pavement design procedure using Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). This was accomplished through integration of environmental and economic impacts into the current ME pavement design framework. To facilitate the use of EPDs, a windows-based tool with a graphical user interface, was developed. The simple interface tool enables the user to filter and query the environmental impacts based on criteria such as compressive strength, product name, and product mix number. The final selection criteria can be adjusted by the user, based on feedback from the stakeholders. Two design case studies are presented to demonstrate the use of the developed tool.