Abstract
The goal of sustainability involves a consensus among economic, environmental and social factors. Due to climate change, environmental concerns have increased in society. The construction sector is among the most active high environmental impact sectors. This paper proposes new features to consider a more detailed life-cycle assessment (LCA) of reinforced or pre-stressed concrete structures. Besides, this study carries out a comparison between two optimal post-tensioned concrete box-girder road bridges with different maintenance scenarios. ReCiPe method is used to carry out the life-cycle assessment. The midpoint approach shows a complete environmental profile with 18 impact categories. In practice, all the impact categories make their highest contribution in the manufacturing and use and maintenance stages. Afterwards, these two stages are analyzed to identify the process which makes the greatest contribution. In addition, the contribution of CO2 fixation is taken into account, reducing the environmental impact in the use and maintenance and end of life stages. The endpoint approach shows more interpretable results, enabling an easier comparison between different stages and solutions. The results show the importance of considering the whole life-cycle, since a better design reduces the global environmental impact despite a higher environmental impact in the manufacturing stage.
Highlights
The term ‘sustainable development’ appeared for the first time in the Our Common Future report by The World Commission on Environment and Development [1], and can be defined as “development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of the future generation”
This paper presents a methodology to carry out the life-cycle assessment (LCA) for reinforced concrete structures, focusing on bridges
LCA is a method to obtain the environmental impact of a product along its whole life, assessing the inputs and outputs of a system
Summary
The term ‘sustainable development’ appeared for the first time in the Our Common Future report by The World Commission on Environment and Development [1], and can be defined as “development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of the future generation”. This report already considers that to achieve sustainable development it is necessary to take into account economic, environmental and social factors. Economic, environmental and social factors are the basic aspects to consider in order to achieve sustainability. This implies integrating different ratings in a final assessment that can be carried out by a decision-making process. Sustainable construction can be defined as construction that achieves a consensus among economic, environmental and social aspects throughout its whole life. It is first necessary to assess these three pillars of sustainability throughout the whole life of a construction project, and apply the decision-making process to obtain a single evaluation of its sustainability
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