Research On The Invironmental Impact Of HMA Pavement And WMA Pavement Based On LCA

In order to clarify the dispute that which is more environment-friendly between HMA technology and WMA technology, guiding by the pavement LCA theory, the environmental impact factors of the whole life cycle of HMA pavement and WMA pavement are detailedly investgated, LCA models of the two asphalt pavements are built, and then a case study is conducted in this paper.In the case study, considering that the long-term performance of WMA pavement is still undefined, five schemes are designed to further calculate, and the calculation results are transformed into characterization and indicators to conduct an environmental impact assessment. The assessment results show that, if the long-term performance of WMA pavement is better than, or equal to, or slightly worse than that of HMA pavement, the environmental impact of WMA pavement on climate change and human health are significantly less than that of HMA pavement, while the the environmental impact of both WMA pavement and HMA pavement on resource depletion are almost equal. Only if the long-term performance of WMA pavement is much worse than that of HMA pavement, the values of these environmental impact indicators are more than that of HMA pavement. Due to the low possibility of this situation that the long-term performance of WMA pavement is much worse than that of HMA pavement, from the view of life cycle, WMA pavement is more environment-friendly than HMA pavement and it is benefit for achieving the goal of energy saving and emissions reduction to promote the use of WMA technology. Besides, a sensitivity analysis and an uncertainty analysis are also conducted in this paper.