Life-Cycle Assessment of the Production of Swiss Road Materials
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 24, Issue 2
Abstract
Sustainable development demands contributions across all economic sectors. Thus, the infrastructure field, in this case road infrastructure, also has to contribute its part by generating road materials and road construction with lower environmental impacts. This paper analyzes the environmental potentials hidden in road materials used in Swiss road pavements. For several materials used in road construction, cradle-to-gate life-cycle assessments (LCA) were performed, taking into account all environmental impacts from raw material extraction to the finished product at the production plant. Environmental improvement potentials were analyzed for the production of asphalt mixtures, concrete mixtures, and subbase mixtures, using eight different environmental impact indicators. The results show differences in the environmental impact between best case and current status production setup of up to 54% for asphalt mixtures, 38% for concrete mixtures, and 93% for subbase mixtures.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Swiss Bituminous Mixture Industry and Association of the Swiss Cement Industry. We would like to thank all 15 members of the expert group guiding this research project for their support and their inputs. Furthermore, we would like to thank Prof. Dr. Stefanie Hellweg and her team from the Institute of Environmental Engineering at ETH Zurich for the very valuable discussions.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 24 • Issue 2 • February 2012
Pages: 168 - 176
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 28, 2010
Accepted: Aug 4, 2011
Published online: Aug 4, 2011
Published in print: Feb 1, 2012
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