Abstract
The demand to provide more sustainable facilities and infrastructure has increased over the past ten years. The ability to measure and quantify the environmental impacts of such projects is in higher demand. Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies/tools are developed for highway infrastructure and pavements but a limited number of studies have been developed for airports and few for their pavement facilities. This paper introduces a pavement LCA tool called LCAAIR 1.0 to fill the necessary gap in quantifying sustainability strategies for airfield pavements. LCA-AIR incorporates the material production, construction/maintenance and rehabilitation, and use phases in the analysis. It uses standard indicators from TRACI to quantify these impacts based on two functional units (square yard and pounds-mile traveled). LCA-AIR showed that each phase contributed to the environmental impact but overall, the use phase produced the greatest LCA impact factors. The material production (MP) phase was heavily influenced by the binding agent (cement or asphalt). Brooming for foreign object debris (FOD) contributed significantly to the construction/maintenance and rehabilitation (CMR) phase. Use (U) phase was dominated by aircraft operations, particularly taking off and cruising. LCA-AIR currently does not consider the pavement end of life phase. An LCA example and corresponding environmental impacts for two different pavement types (Portland cement concrete and asphalt concrete) over the lifespan of a new airfield is provided to demonstrate the capabilities of LCA-AIR.
Published Version
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