Economic life cycle analysis techniques assist highway agencies to develop priority lists for maintenance/rehabilitation works. This ensures an optimum spending of the maintenance budget each year, which in turn serves the interest of both the stakeholder and the road user. Although these types of systems are commonly utilized by highway agencies, few, if any, consider the environmental impact of road maintenance activities as part of the decision-making process. To assess the environmental impact of a road rehabilitation project, consideration must be given to the actual benefits and/or adverse effects to the environment during rehabilitation activities. Any associated benefits and/or adverse effects should ideally be assessed in terms of greenhouse gas reductions/increases when comparing maintenance strategies. AMEC have recently developed a software programme that can assess greenhouse gas reductions accrued by utilizing road recycling processes when compared to traditional maintenance strategies. The programme quantifies greenhouse gas production in terms of tonnes of CO2e, for maintenance strategies, either on a project-by-project basis or over the life cycle of the project. Both upstream factors (i.e., environmental effects of producing the fuel to enable production, transportation and placement) and downstream factors (i.e., environmental cost of material production, transportation and placement) are considered. This paper describes the concept behind the software development, together with numerical examples utilizing real projects in the province of Nova Scotia. (A) For the covering abstract of this conference see ITRD number E220308.
Abstract