United States Department of Transportation
i
Assessing the environmental impacts of work zones in arterial improvement projects.
-
2014-12-01
[PDF-2.16 MB]
Details:
-
Creators:
-
Corporate Creators:
-
Corporate Contributors:
-
Subject/TRT Terms:
-
Publication/ Report Number:
-
Resource Type:
-
Geographical Coverage:
-
Corporate Publisher:
-
Abstract:Preservation treatments help in extending the remaining service lives of pavements, but at the same time, they
may have substantial environmental impacts due to the acquisition of raw materials, transportation of the extracted
materials, manufacturing of the final product, and the use of various equipment during the treatment process.
Traditional and accelerated maintenance, repair and rehabilitation (MRR) techniques were identified for both
flexible and rigid pavements. Environmental impacts of the commonly used MRR strategies were calculated. A
life cycle assessment (LCA) approach was used, taking into account the life extension of the pavement for each
type of strategy. The scope boundary included only the construction activities relevant to pavement MRR. LCA
results showed that for flexible pavements, accelerated rehabilitation techniques like partial or full depth
reclamation have less life cycle environmental impacts than traditional techniques like milling and overlay or total
reconstruction. For rigid pavements, all the rehabilitation techniques are comparatively new. The environmental
impacts were found to be similar for both traditional techniques like concrete full depth repair and accelerated
techniques like precast concrete pavement systems. Minor treatment processes for both flexible and rigid
pavements like fog seal, crack seal, concrete seal joints, diamond grinding, and concrete partial depth repair have
minimum impacts with maximum benefits when the corresponding life extensions are compared. The results
obtained can assist highway construction management professionals to select environmentally sustainable MRR
solutions.
-
Format:
-
Funding:
-
Collection(s):
-
Main Document Checksum:
-
Download URL:
-
File Type:
