Energy and Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Asphalt Pavements: A Scenario Analysis for Urban Roads

This paper aims at calculating the life-cycle energy and the environmental impacts pertaining to roads management, including materials production, transportation, construction, maintenance, and rehabilitation. A life-cycle approach is applied to assess energy and environmental impacts of a typical Italian urban road, according to the ISO 14040 series. In more detail, the Authors assess the energy and environmental profile of different optimized scenarios of bituminous mixtures. The aim of scenario analysis is to identify the less impacting scenario from an energy and environmental point of view. For each analysed scenario, the contribution of each life-cycle step to the total impacts and the energy and environmental hotspots are identified in order to define suitable options for improvement.Results show that the pavement scenarios, characterized by the use of recycled materials, involves lower energy and environmental impacts, due to the saving of virgin raw materials and avoided impacts for disposal