Pavement life cycle assessment: A comparison of American and european tools

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.