An Environmental Impact Comparative Study Of The Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway And Highway Infrastructure Based On LCA

China’s highway has been developing rapidly in the recent 30 years. The total mileage of highway opened to traffic is 104,000km in end of 2013, which surpassed that in America and ranked 1st in the world. The transport facilities have been developing with the increasing of the economy. While the highway has been developing, the high-speed railway has been constructed massively. The construction speed of high-speed railway keeps increasing in the support of national policy. With the features of large capacity and high efficiency, the high-speed railway deals with the conflict of large population with limited resources well. However, as the important transport modes in China, the project volume of the highway and the high-speed railway is massive. As infrastructure, while creating economic and social benefits, the construction of highways and high-speed railway has a great impact on the environment. The guiding ideology for the high-speed railway is substituting roads with bridges. The main way of electricity production is coal power, which is featured with low efficiency and high emissions. Under this circumstance, the impact of high-speed railway construction on the environment should be analyzed comprehensively.This paper studies the impact of construction of highway and high-speed railway on the environment with the life circle analysis (LCA) method. The eBalance is used to the modeling and list calculation. The energy consumption and environmental emission of the highways and high-speed railway during the construction period is studied. Environmental friendly proposals are put forward based on the analysis results. The study divided the construction of high-speed railway into four subsystems; they are bridge, tunnel, roadbed and rail. The energy consumption and environmental emission of each subsystem is analyzed by calculating the total building materials and the equipment operating time according to the lists of production with regional characteristics. The calculation result shows that the energy consumption of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway is 374503.0TJ and the carbon emission is 45493.4KtCO2e. The length of the bridge is 86% of the total length of the high-speed railway. The carbon emission of the bridge system is 84.6% of the total carbon emission and the energy consumption is 83.14% of the total energy consumption. The proportion of energy consumption and carbon emission of tunnel, roadbed and rail to the total energy consumption and carbon emission of the construction of Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway is less than that of the bridge system. The energy consumption and carbon emission of tunnel construction is the largest per kilometer.The production of raw materials is the main source of energy consumption and environmental emissions during the infrastructure construction period. Cement and steel are two significant factors that affect the highway and high-speed railway construction. The carbon emission of the high-speed railway and highway is 34.52 KtCO2e and 3.38 KtCO2e respectively. The energy consumption is 284.14TJ and 14.13TJ respectively. The environmental impact index value of high-speed railway construction is about 10 times that of the highway construction.