Materials role in pavement design and its impacts in LCA of road construction and use phase

Abstract

Abstract Connecting real material databases at a very early stage enables to measure, predict and support informed decision making based on energy and carbon performance in the infrastructure sector. While, in the past twenty years, a significant increase of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) research for road construction projects was seen, data collection and management still remains one of the main challenges. Having a capability to combine the planning, execution, maintenance and recycling on one platform greatly contributes to reducing the effort and assessment execution time and early stage decision makings. ORIS is the first web-based material platform enabling more sustainable road construction with optimised solutions, bringing an assessment of different pavement design options within a geolocalised material sourcing environment. Based on the embedding local design catalogues and its automatized data-driven approach, an exhaustive LCA analysis is performed on road for its whole life cycle conformed to LCA standards. A case study in the United Kingdom demonstrated the life cycle carbon and cost assessment with a significant contribution of use phase modules (30-40% of the total) and the potential of 56% reduction in the global warming indicator from the product and construction phase and 24% in total life cycle saving 720 k£.