Review and comparison of freely-available tools for pavement carbon footprinting in Europe

This paper wants to raise awareness of LCA/CF tools that have been built within European projects in the last 5-6 years and that are freely-available on the internet: asPECT, ECORCE M and CARBON ROAD MAP. The tools will be compared in terms of their architecture and system boundaries considered, as well as on the basis of the results of a comparative carbon foot printing exercise of several high content reclaimed asphalt wearing courses. This will provide practitioners with clearer ideas on the benefits and limitations of the existing tools, will provide suggestions to perform the carbon footprinting analyses in Europe and through the comparison of the results will allow drawing some guidelines for the final user. and system boundaries considered, as well as comparing the results of environmental impact assessment exercise based on a CF study performed within another European project Allback2Pave (2016). This will provide engineers of Road Authorities and practitioners with an idea of which could be the more effective tool for performing environmental impact assessment of road pavement components (e.g. asphalt mixtures) in EU. A final comparison of the CF results will allow drawing some guidelines for the final user. 2 REVIEW OF THE LCA/CF TOOLS IN EUROPE A recent comprehensive overview of the currently available pavement LCA and carbon footprinting tools allowing an estimate of the environmental impacts of road pavement technologies (i.e. asphalt mixtures) within their lifecycle, is provided by Spriensma et al. (2014). This section presents an overview of suggested tools that could be used from European Road Authorities to perform an environmental impact assessment exercise. These tools have the common characteristics of being: • Freely available and accessible • Based on full process LCA • User-friendly and in any case accompanied by a user manual • Able to perform at least a cradle-to-laid Carbon foot printing of road pavement technologies Furthermore some of them also allow to: • Perform a full pavement LCA, not only providing the carbon footprint • Perform a cradle-to-grave analysis (up to end of life) • Use references and databases developed in EU countries Additionally, other more general, complex professional LCA tools can be used to assess/compare the environmental impact of road pavement technologies to be used in road pavements. These tools are not presented in this report and consist in softwares such as BEES, GaBi and SimaPro, which allows higher flexibility and possibly a more detailed estimation, but are not cost-free and need professional expertise.