How road cross-sections affect the environmental impacts from cradle to grave

Abstract

At the international level, increasing efforts have been made to assess the burdens of transport by road and adopt effective mitigation strategies. In this study, life cycle analyses have been carried out to compare the environmental performances of 100 m-long highway sections during 60 year-service life. According to the standard EN 15804, emissions and abiotic depletions have been assessed for four different cross-sections (i.e., embankment, trench, bridge, and tunnel) paved with asphalt or concrete and traveled by motor vehicles during their service life. The software SimaPro gave results in terms of construction, operation, and traffic: whatever the pavement, trenches are the least impactful sections, and the opposite is for tunnels (e.g., 5.72 × 10 6 and 1.12 × 10 7 kg CO 2 eq. respectively across the entire life with rigid pavement). As concerns the construction phase, flexible pavements imply fewer burdens than rigid ones; the opposite is across the entire life. Therefore, the adoption of green strategies to manage roads requires deep knowledge to implement effective procedures at different life cycle stages.