Authors
Lo Presti, Davide; Buttitta, Gabriella; Jiménez del Barco Carrión, Ana; Parry, Tony; Keijzer, Elisabeth; Kalman, Bjorn; Mantalovas, Konstantinos
Abstract
Nowadays, LCA is a powerful tool to quantify impacts and to support sustainable decision making. Nevertheless, within the construction industry not always detailed rules are present for each field of application. In the case of road pavements, for which sustainability is becoming a main keyword in planning, design and maintenance activities, a specific european framework to carry out harmonised LCA is still missing. The Pavement LCM project is working to fill this gap to help European National Road Authorities and the road construction industry in the introduction of sustainability assessment at the heart of their practices. This investigation will present the details of the recently developed PavementLCM framework including best practices to perform LCA of road pavement materials (cradle-to-gate) and road pavement activities (cradle-to-GRAVE). The framework was developed in compliance with: the current standards of sustainability assessment of construction works, the ILCD guidelines of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, as well as the existing LCA frameworks of the European Asphalt Pavement Association for road pavement’s materials and the american federal highway administration for road pavement’s activities. With this work the authors would like to share these results to share knowledge with the scientific community working with life cycle management practices and to promote best practices towards harmonised sustainability assessment practices in the construction industry.