Life Cycle Assessment on port pavements Case study-Norvik Port

There is an urgent need to develop sustainable infrastructure solutions. Considering this, it is of great importance to conduct LCA analysis due to the overall impact of the construction sector, which is around 30% of the energy consumption worldwide. Furthermore, the transport sector accounts for 24% of the total CO2 emissions. In light of this, the ELISA project, to which this thesis refers to, aims at improving the sustainability of infrastructures, by reducing energy and resource consumption, and creating a platform where it is possible to share knowledge and information, obtained using various technologies (J. D. Rodriguez Millan, 2024). The main objective of this thesis is to evaluate the environmental impact of port pavements, through the use of the Life Cycle Assessment. In order to achieve that a concrete block pavement, employed at Norvik port, Sweden, is analysed and compared with two other design solutions, a concrete and a flexible pavement. Therefore the design of the two alternative pavements is assessed. The pavements are designed referring to the Heavy duty pavement manual, by Jhon Knapton, published by Interpave, which provides a methodology to design port pavements. Subsequently, just for the sake of comparison, the designs are re-evaluated with the AASHTO ’93 manual, a commonly used method to design highway pavements. To compare the rigid and flexible pavements to the concrete block ones, a Life Cycle Assessment is conducted considering both the construction and the maintenance phase. A Life Cycle Inventory is carried out, collecting all the necessary data for each step of the LCA from the “Life Cycle Assessment of roads”, realised by the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute. The functional unit adopted is one square meter of pavement, and the environmental impact is assessed through CO2 equivalents (eq.). The outcomes suggest that the construction phase has a more significant adverse environmental impact, when compared to the maintenance phase. The most crucial design, in terms of carbon footprint, is the concrete pavement. This is due the “production of cement”, which is the most crucial step in the construction phase, even when compared to the “production of bitumen”. Therefore the more environmentally friendly design, among those considered, is the fully flexible pavement. At the same time, the concrete block pavements have higher CO2 eq. emissions, with respect to emissions of the flexible design solution, because of the concrete block surface.