Environmental life cycle assessment of hot mix asphalt boulevard road

Abstract

Roads being as the main component of the transport infrastructure offer a great contribution on to the production of jobs opportunity and expansion in gross domestic product (GDP). The capacity to carry merchandise and passengers to several kilometers with great flexibility and at a cheap cost is the key point of road transport. Transport infrastructure is a kind of framework that provides support for system of the transportation. Nevertheless, together with road transportation; The construction of roads infrastructure as well as the maintenance works, produce different environmental emissions in addition to the greenhouse gases, in all around the world by the regular increasing in consumption of energy and raw materials. United Arab Emirate classified internationally as one of major green house gas emitters globally with 23.3 Tones CO2-e/ Person. Due to this high value of CO2 equivalent emissions all activities contributing to these emissions must be optimized. Road construction, maintenance and end-of-life is among activities that generate environmental impacts. Almost all the asphalt paved roads in Abu Dhabi (21,673 Km length) is constructed by using natural raw materials. Abu Dhabi Vision for coming years, regarding the largest emission from transportation and road constructions to be reduced by 12%. The life cycle assessment (LCA) technique is a flexible tool that help in reporting decisions on resource and process selection for a better understanding, assessing, measuring and minimizing in the environmental effects of a process, product or a system. The objective of this study is to assess the environmental impacts caused by Emirati Neighborhood in Zayed city road pavement project by covering construction, maintenance and end-of-life (EoL) stages using the approach of LCA. Based on the results obtained, decisions and governmental strategies can be made for the development of environmentally friendly road pavement. In this framework, the data of inputs and outputs of each layer of the road pavement per 1 km asphalt road are gathered and modeled.