Developing a Life Cycle Management methodology for road pavements

The necessity of implementing sustainability is a main challenge in our society and it is taking up also in civil engineering works sector, although the infrastructure field is still understanding how to make the Sustainability Assessment (SA) a common practice within the National Road Authorities (NRAs). This research aims at providing a specific methodology for the Life Cycle Management (LCM) of road pavements materials and activities, starting from the available ISO and EN standards, by using Life-Cycle based techniques and Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), with the aim of assessing performance under the three pillars of sustainability.

Life Cycle Assessment of Asphalt Mixtures with WMR

This study aimed at providing pavement specialists with international average values of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and energy consumption related to the manufacturing of asphalt mixtures (cradle-to-gate), with and without waste and secondary materials for roads (WMRs). In order to achieve this goal, TG leaders first referred to current standards to define a methodology for obtaining benchmark values according to ISO 21678:2020. Then, a data collection tool was designed and provided to a group of international partners to build a life cycle inventory for asphalt mixtures including data from materials up to plant manufacturing (A1–A3). Partners were asked to provide information for any ty…

Investigating Tools for Sustainability Assessment of Road Pavements in Europe

Sustainability assessment (SA) is a method to support decision making processes through the evaluation of system effectiveness, environmental integrity, economic valuation, and social implications [1]. SA can be carried out through the application of life-cycle-based techniques for quantitative assessment, or by performing a mainly qualitative approach via sustainability rating systems (SRS). In the field of civil engineering, many SRS have been proposed, all based on assigning point values to actions that are determined to contribute to the overall sustainability of the project. However, only few of these systems can be applied specifically to compare road pavement technologies and/or main…

Life Cycle Management delle pavimentazioni stradali

Ormai parola chiave della nostra società, la sostenibilità è al centro di ricerche e dibattiti. La comunità scientifica si impegna da anni nella definizione di strumenti e metodologie comuni per riuscire a quantificarla, proponendo standard e linee guida basate sull’analisi del ciclo di vita, come il Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), di prodotti e processi. Nell’ambito dell’ingegneria civile esistono procedure standardizzate a livello internazionale per svolgere esercizi di Sustainability Assessment; queste risultano ben strutturate per gli edifici, meno dettagliate invece per altre opere, come le pavimentazioni stradali. Questo lavoro presenta il risultato principale del progetto “PavementLCM”,…

Uncertainty analysis of life cycle assessment of asphalt surfacings

The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of asphalt pavements are associated with significant uncertainty resulting from variability in the quantity and impact of individual components, the quality of data for each component, and variability of asphalt durability. This study presents a framework to quantify and incorporate the uncertainty of LCA and asphalt durability data into LCA of asphalt surfacings. The suggested framework includes: estimating the uncertainty of asphalt production processes by the pedigree matrix method, conducting a deterministic LCA, applying Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) to estimate the probability density functions (PDFs) of the considered impacts using the uncertainty data,…

SyRAF - Synthesised Results and Applicable Findings of CEDR Call 2017 New Materials