Comparison of Environmental Loads With Rail Track Systems Using Simplified Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

This paper on the use of life cycle assessment (LCA) for rail track systems is from the proceedings of 14th international Conference on Urban Transport and the Environment in the 21st Century, which was held in Malta in 2008. The authors describe the use of LCA to compare the environmental impact of different rail track systems, including ballast track and concrete track. They note that rail infrastructure has been changed from ballast track to concrete track due to the ease of maintenance without considering prior environmental impact. In this study, two rail track systems, gravel ballast and the concrete track system, constructed recently on the Seoul–Busan High-speed Line for running KTX (Korea Train eXpress), were compared by quantifying their environmental loads using a LCA tool. The study considered resource depletion, global warming, ozone depletion, photochemical oxidant creation, acidification, eutrophication, ecology toxicity, and human toxicity. The results showed that the ballast tract system had a better environmental position by approximately 1.6 times compared to the concrete track, which resulted from the frequent maintenance of ballast track. The authors conclude that LCA used for railway infrastructure can be a beneficial technology for incorporating sustainable development.