Suggested Citation:
Wang, Yu, Hui Li, Ahmed Abdelhady, John T. Harvey (2018) Initial Evaluation Methodology and Case Studies in China for Life Cycle Impact of Permeability of Permeable Pavements. Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

In recent years, urban flooding turns up frequently in Chinese cities, which causes lots of economic and environmental losses. As a significant element of sponge city which is proposed to deal with the issue, permeable pavements are paid great attention to and applied growingly due to their ability of mitigating the damage of urban flooding and other environmental benefits. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a newly developed evaluation approach that can be applied to estimate the environmental impact of pervious pavements through the entire life cycle. Many models have been used to evaluate the effect of pavement characteristics in the environment. Moreover, use-phase models for urban heat island effect, rolling resistance and so on were proposed and developed while use-phase models for permeability have been still missing. This study provides a primary model which can be applied to both permeable asphalt pavements and permeable concrete pavements to quantify the environmental effects of permeability of these permeable pavements. The environmental impacts are estimated from three factors using statistical data from literature, namely urban flooding, water recycling and water purification. Then a comparison between permeable asphalt pavement and dense-graded asphalt pavement is conducted using the model developed. Results indicate that 49TJ of energy consumption, 6700t of equivalent carbon dioxide emissions, 0.1t of lead emissions and 1t of zinc emissions are avoided because of the application of permeable pavements for 10km asphalt pavement. Moreover, 73.48% reduction of energy consumption, 46.70% reduction of GHG emissions, 98.33% reduction of lead emissions and 99.70% reduction of zinc emissions occur in the use phase.

Key words: Case studies, evaluation, life cycle analysis, methodology, permeability, porous pavements