Preservation Treatments are Environmentally Sustainable

This article will discuss how today’s pavement preservation treatments are environmentally sustainable strategies for road maintenance and life extension. Recent analyses of energy inputs and emissions outputs of pavement preservation treatments show that these treatments have significantly lowered energy usage and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to conventional reconstruction and rehabilitation. The basics of energy use (inputs) and GHG emissions for various pavement materials, construction processes, and pavement preservation techniques were considered in this article. The authors also compared energy use and GHG emissions on an annualized life-extension. The article shows how pavement preservation techniques offer reduced energy inputs and lower GHG emissions compared to classic hot-mix asphalt, and even warm-mix asphalt reconstruction techniques. Any pavement strategy will require a series of procedures that use energy and emit GHGs. Pavement rehabilitation and reconstruction require large amounts of energy to obtain and process raw materials, transport, mix and apply the final product, while pavement preservation processes require much less energy to apply the final product to the road surface. The big benefit comes during the technique’s service life. The article presents data on energy usage per unit area of pavement life extensions via pavement preservation treatments and compare it to typical design lives of reconstruction and rehabilitation techniques.