Development of an Environmental Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) Protocol for Flexible Pavements that Integrates Life-Cycle Components to a Proprietary Software

Significant progress has been made in research on environmental life-cycle assessment (LCA) of pavements. Use of this new knowledge has been slowed by a lack of standardized datasets and analysis protocols. Several software packages have been developed to address this by providing datasets with broader coverage and better quality, but practitioners need application-specific data input interfaces for easy use. The authors report work on developing a protocol for environmental LCA of flexible pavements that uses a proprietary software system with data input interface plug-ins they developed for each of the five flexible pavement life-cycle phases. This protocol allows designers to integrate environmental LCA with life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) to select the optimum design from several alternatives. With looming transformative changes in pavement materials and technology landscapes, this protocol also has the potential to allow a more effectively holistic assessment of such novel system