The University of California Pavement Research Center (UCPRC, Davis and Berkeley) hosted an International Workshop on Pavement Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) on the University of California – Davis campus on May 5-7, 2010. The event was co-hosted by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC-Berkeley and UC-Davis. The International Society for Asphalt Pavements Technical Committee on Asphalt Pavements and Environment (ISAP-APE) and the International Society for Concrete Pavements (ISCP) were collaborators for the event. [....]
More than 40 invited LCA and sustainability experts from around the world participated in the 2.5-day event, which examined a proposed framework for pavement LCA. Participants discussed proposed system boundaries and assumptions, identified knowledge gaps and potential areas of disagreement, and provided recommendations to the UC research team for improving the proposed framework and general LCA study practices.
The UCPRC project team intends to use the workshop results to improve the proposed LCA framework by several means, including the refinement of system boundaries and assumptions and by providing more transparency in the documentation of how pavement LCA studies should be performed. Final project documents will be posted for comment and critique by the pavement engineering and LCA communities (including through ISCP and ISAP-APE).
The focus of the proposed framework and documentation was for LCA studies that will be performed in California and then northern Europe, but it is expected that the workshop results will also be useful in the development and refinement of guidance documents for pavement LCAs performed in any region. This work is an objective of the Miriam project, which is a joint study on rolling resistance being undertaken by Caltrans and six European countries, and also an objective of a UC funded project to help local government in California develop more sustainable practices for pavement.
Questions concerning this study and workshop can be directed to: Dr. John Harvey at jtharvey@ucdavis.edu.