Comparison of life cycle assessment tools for road pavement infrastructure

Road pavements have considerable environmental burdens associated with their initial construction, maintenance and usage, which has led the pavement stakeholder community make congregate efforts to better understand and mitigate these negative effects. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a versatile methodology to quantify the effect of decisions regarding the selection of resources and processes. However, there is a considerable variety of tools for conducting pavement LCAs. The objective of this paper is to provide the pavement stakeholder community with insights on the potential differences in the life cycle impact assessment results of a pavement by applying American and European LCA tools, namely PaLATE V2.2, VTTI/UC asphalt pavement LCA model, GaBi, DuboCalc and ECORCE-M, to a Spanish pavement reconstruction project. Construction and maintenance life cycle stages were considered in the comparison. Based on the impact assessment methods adopted by the different tools, the following indicators and impact categories were analyzed: energy consumption, climate change, acidification, eutrophication and photochemical ozone creation. The results of the case study showed that it is of crucial importance to develop (1) a more standardized framework for performing a LCA of road pavement that can be adapted to various tools and (2) local databases of materials and processes, which follow national and international standards. use phase models, including analysis of the influence of pavement deterioration on vehicle fuel consumption and emissions and the interaction between pavement, environment, and humans; (3) climate change (CC) adaptation measures for road infrastructures; (4) Product Category Rules (PCRs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs); and (5) implementation of strategies in terms of Green Public Procurement for road infrastructures. To improve the sustainability of road pavement infrastructure, road agencies and construction companies are adopting appropriate methodologies and tools to identify priority areas for improvement. Thus, it is necessary to know the impact of pavements on the environment to develop and implement approaches and procedures that can produce the greatest gains in all aspects and dimensions of the system. LCA is a versatile methodology capable of informing decisions on resource and process selection to better understand, measure, and reduce the environmental impacts of a system Glass et al. (2013). However, there is a considerable variety of tools for conducting pavement LCA, and there are notable differences between them. Available tools cover different phases and processes of the pavement’s life cycle, take different environmental issues into account, and model with distinct levels of accuracy within chosen functional units and system boundaries. They can be global, national, or even regional or local. They have also been developed for different purposes, (e.g., research, consulting, and decision making), and their domain of applicability is tailored for different phases of a project’s life cycle, (e.g., planning, designing, construction and maintenance). Furthermore, they use different foreground and background generic or industry data. Also distinct is the level of interaction they allow with the user. While some of the tools are “black-boxes” in the sense that only the default processes and data can be used, others allow users to use their own data, to choose the database that best match the features of the case study, or even to modify the existing datasets.