Selecting the eco-friendly alternative for pavements can be accurately answered by a dynamic tool.

What is it about?

In this article, we develop a framework for evaluating the environmental impacts of pavements and for making a decision about the eco-friendly alternative. The approach that we chose for this framework is called life cycle assessment (LCA). We consider temporal dynamic changes of pavements during their life cycle stages. We quantified all the emissions and resource consumptions at the life cycle stages, These stages include material extraction for construction materials, construction materials production, use of pavement ( for example, car fuel consumption), maintenance and repair, and end of life, when the pavement is demolished. There are different methods of conducting LCA for analyzing this system. We can make it as simple as only considering some important emissions and forgetting about the details of all life cycle phases. Or, we can do a more comprehensive assessment is that precisely considers all the parameters in the analysis but forget about the emissions that will change in time. Ultimately, we can consider the dynamic aspect of the pavement and its interaction with the environment. As we choose a more advanced method for our evaluation, we have more complexity in the system but we obtain more accurate results.

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Why is it important?

For environmental assessment of pavement, it is more important to implement the dynamic detailed LCA. Why? Because during the long service life of the pavement, many criteria will change as a function of pavement age and pavement use. For example, in Quebec, we know if we need more electricity to consume in winter, we should import it from the fossil fuel power plant in the U.S. But in long-term, if we have a change in electricity demand due to temperature change, we have enough renewable energy from wind turbines to cover our needs. Therefore, the technology and its corresponding environmental impacts of change in electricity consumption for tomorrow and for 20 years later are different. Another example of dynamic changes, from a civil engineering point of view, is that as we drive our vehicles on the pavement, we change the quality of the road surface and therefore, we increase the surface roughness in time. Or, the asphalt pavement will have lighter color surface and concrete color will get darker as they get older.

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