COMPARISON OF LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT TOOLS FOR ROAD PAVEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE
Résumé
Road pavements have considerable environmental burdens associated with their initial construction, maintenance, and usage, which has led the pavement stakeholder community to 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 LCA. 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 standardized framework for performing a road pavement LCA that can be adapted to various tools and (2) local databases of materials and processes that follow national and international standards.
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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