LCA Evaluates Costs & Environment Impacts of Infrastructure

The Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released two studies looking at the life cycle assessment (LCA) of concrete pavements and buildings. A third assessment looked at life-cycling costing for streets and highways.

Both studies signify major advancements for construction-related life-cycle assessments. They thoroughly examine the cost and environmental impacts for the full life of pavements and buildings-including the use and operations phase—not just the costs and embodied CO2 that occur at initial construction. Currently, most LCAs in use do not fully account for these impacts, which can include traffic delays, energy consumption and maintenance.

MIT also used this life-cycle approach to evaluate the real cost of pavement throughout a 50-year lifetime, beyond initial construction costs. Researchers started with the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Life-Cycle Cost Analysis in Pavement Design Interim Technical Bulletin, a process that accounts for both initial construction and future rehabilitation.

What the FHWA procedure fails to account for, however, are changes in the prices of building materials over the life of the pavement. MIT’s research showed that during a 50-year timeframe, the mean real price of concrete decreases by 20%, while the mean real price of asphalt increases by 95%. To allow states to address this, MIT developed a paper and a procedure that departments of transportation can readily adopt to account for inflation.

The reports are available on the Hub website, http://web.mit.edu/cshub/.

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