Environmental Impact Assessment of Transportation Infrastructure in the Life Cycle: Case Study of a Fast Track Transportation Project in China

The transportation sector generates enormous amount of environmental emission. This study aims to assess the environmental impact of the environmental emissions in a transportation infrastructure project life cycle. Using the fast track transportation project in China as a case study, the materials used and the energy consumed over the life cycle were converted into environmental emissions. The life cycle of fast track transportation project was divided into three phases including construction, maintenance and repair, and demolition phases. Both qualitative and quantitative method were applied to explore the environmental impact of transportation project. The life cycle assessment (LCA) method was used for the development environmental impact assessment (EIA) model to analyze the contribution of each process in the transportation project life cycle. The empirical results show that the construction phase has the highest environmental impact (62.7%) in the fast track transportation project life cycle, followed by the demolition (35.8%) and maintenance phases (1.7%). Among the materials used in the fast track transportation project, steel has the highest proportion of environmental impact in the construction phase (55.5%). This indicates the enormous environmental impact of the construction phase in fast track transportation project life cycle results from the use of steel material. This study contributes to reducing environmental emissions by revealing the greatest phase of environmental impact and material-source of environmental impact over the life cycle in a transportation infrastructure project.

[1]  Joke Anthonissen,et al.  Using carbon dioxide emissions as a criterion to award road construction projects: a pilot case in Flanders , 2015 .

[2]  Helge Brattebø,et al.  Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Bridges , 2013 .

[3]  Tim Johansson,et al.  Analysis of alternative road construction staging approaches to reduce carbon dioxide emissions , 2017 .

[4]  Jiayuan Wang,et al.  A review on contemporary computational programs for Building's life-cycle energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions assessment: An empirical study in Australia , 2018 .

[5]  Bo Shen,et al.  Probabilistic Design of Environmentally Sustainable Reinforced-Concrete Transportation Infrastructure Incorporating Maintenance Optimization , 2017 .

[6]  V. Yepes,et al.  Life-Cycle Assessment: A Comparison between Two Optimal Post-Tensioned Concrete Box-Girder Road Bridges , 2017 .

[7]  Yong Geng,et al.  Emergy based carbon footprinting of household solid waste management scenarios in Pakistan , 2017 .

[8]  Catherine Azzaro-Pantel,et al.  Bridging LCA data gaps by use of process simulation for energy generation , 2017, Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy.

[9]  Simona Miraglia,et al.  How the inclusion of life cycle impacts affects transport cost-benefit analysis , 2018, European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research.

[10]  Ali Mostafavi,et al.  Putting sustainability theory into roadway design practice: Implementation of LCA and LCCA analysis for pavement type selection in real world decision making , 2017 .

[11]  Bo Xia,et al.  Assessing the life cycle CO2 emissions of reinforced concrete structures: Four cases from China , 2018, Journal of Cleaner Production.

[12]  Zhengyu Duan,et al.  Estimation of carbon dioxide emission in highway construction: a case study in southwest region of China , 2015 .

[13]  S. Chakrabarti.  Can highway development promote employment growth in India? , 2018, Transport Policy.

[14]  M. Erlandsson,et al.  Climate impacts from road bridges: effects of introducing concrete carbonation and biogenic carbon storage in wood , 2018 .

[15]  A. VanderZaag.  On the systematic underestimation of methane conversion factors in IPCC guidance. , 2018, Waste management.

[16]  Yingling Fan,et al.  CO2 emissions and expansion of railway, road, airline and in-land waterway networks over the 1985–2013 period in China: A time series analysis , 2017 .

[17]  Rafik Belarbi,et al.  Cradle-to-gate Life Cycle Assessment of traditional gravel ballasted, white reflective, and vegetative roofs: A Lebanese case study , 2016 .

[18]  Zhiwei Zhang,et al.  Material metabolism and lifecycle GHG emissions of urban road system (URS) , 2017 .

[19]  Shawn Hinz,et al.  A roadmap for a quantitative ecosystem-based environmental impact assessment , 2016, bioRxiv.

[20]  Fotini Kehagia,et al.  A Holistic Approach for Estimating Carbon Emissions of Road and Rail Transport Systems , 2017 .

[21]  Guoqin Zhang,et al.  Modeling energy-related CO2 emissions from office buildings using general regression neural network , 2018 .

[22]  Marta Starostka-Patyk.  New Products Design Decision Making Support by SimaPro Software on the Base of Defective Products Management , 2015 .

[23]  Jie Wang,et al.  Multi-Level Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation of Bridge Carbon Intensity Based on Life-Cycle Carbon Emission Model , 2011 .

[24]  Luc Int Panis,et al.  Fine Atmospheric Particles from Agricultural Practices in Flanders: From Emissions to Health Effects and Limit Values , 2014 .

[25]  Reyn Joseph O'Born,et al.  Life cycle assessment of large scale timber bridges: A case study from the world’s longest timber bridge design in Norway , 2018 .

[26]  Kim Bang Salling,et al.  Integrating Life-cycle Assessment into Transport Cost-benefit Analysis , 2016 .

[27]  Hussain Ali Bekhet,et al.  Analysis of CO2 emissions reduction in the Malaysian transportation sector: An optimisation approach , 2016 .

[28]  Kuan Yew Wong,et al.  Sustainable product design and development: A review of tools, applications and research prospects , 2018 .

[29]  Ashraf El-Hamalawi,et al.  Development and Implementation of a Lifecycle Carbon Tool for Highway Maintenance , 2015 .

[30]  D. Loughlin,et al.  Exploring the role of natural gas power plants with carbon capture and storage as a bridge to a low-carbon future , 2017, Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy.

[31]  A. Horvath,et al.  Environmental assessment of passenger transportation should include infrastructure and supply chains , 2009 .

[32]  Jiyong Eom,et al.  China's transportation energy consumption and CO2 emissions from a global perspective , 2015 .

[33]  Dalia Streimikiene,et al.  Comparative assessment of road transport technologies , 2013 .

[34]  Maurizio Cellura,et al.  Energy-related GHG emissions balances: IPCC versus LCA. , 2018, The Science of the total environment.

[35]  Callie W. Babbitt,et al.  A life cycle comparison of disposal and beneficial use of coal combustion products in Florida , 2008 .

[36]  J. Eyckmans,et al.  Downcycling versus recycling of construction and demolition waste: Combining LCA and LCC to support sustainable policy making. , 2018, Waste management.

[37]  Hanbin Luo,et al.  Assessment of material related embodied carbon of an office building in Sri Lanka , 2018 .

[38]  M. Ha-Duong,et al.  Climate change 2014 - Mitigation of climate change , 2015 .

[39]  Charles Mbohwa,et al.  Life cycle assessment of steel balls , 2015, 2015 International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IEOM).

[40]  Shao-hua Wu,et al.  Impacts of highway construction and operation on carbon footprint in China: A case study of Jiangsu Province , 2016 .

[41]  Yuanqing Wang,et al.  Estimation and uncertainty analysis on carbon dioxide emissions from construction phase of real highway projects in China , 2017 .

[42]  Moatassem Abdallah,et al.  Time-Environmental Impacts Tradeoff Analysis for Businesses Commuters , 2018 .

[43]  Ji Han,et al.  Roads, economy, population density, and CO2: A city-scaled causality analysis , 2018 .

[44]  Khalid Ahmed,et al.  A predictive analysis of CO2 emissions, environmental policy stringency, and economic growth in China , 2018, Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

[45]  Simon Buckle,et al.  Mitigation of climate change , 2009, The Daunting Climate Change.

[46]  Tao Huang,et al.  Toward a Low Carbon–Dematerialization Society , 2012 .

[47]  S. Limjirakan,et al.  Key factors of low carbon development strategy for sustainable transport , 2018 .

[48]  Senthilmurugan Thyagarajan,et al.  Comparison of Life-Cycle Assessment Tools for Road Pavement Infrastructure , 2017 .

[49]  Ruixi Lin,et al.  Modeling the railway network design problem: A novel approach to considering carbon emissions reduction , 2017 .

[50]  Hui-Bing Xie,et al.  Life-time reliability based optimization of bridge maintenance strategy considering LCA and LCC , 2018 .