The environmental impact evaluation on the application of permeable pavement based on life cycle analysis

Conventional pavement, namely concrete and asphalt pavements, usually necessitate considerable energy inputs during construction. Due to increasing road coverage in cities and the impervious feature of conventional pavements, the heat island effect is becoming increasingly severe. Many environmental problems have appeared. Permeable pavements have improved the situation. This study intends to achieve a convincing comparison of the environmental impacts of permeable pavements and conventional pavements. A methodological framework of life cycle assessment is used to quantify the environmental impacts in the study. The results indicated that during the use of the road, pavement roughness will increase and greatly impact the vehicle fuel consumption and road GHG emissions. The maintenance needs to be implemented in time. The cold mixing polymer composite based pavement has the best environmental friendly potential among three different pavement surface materials selected in the present research. Porous asphalt pavement does not show significant advantage in reducing energy consumption and GHG emissions comparing to the normal dense asphalt. This may because asphalt production requires heating, and the permeable feature of pavement is not considered. This study presented a basic evaluation of the environmental characteristics of different pavement materials. It provides a basis for the evaluation of environmental factors in pavement design and construction, which promotes a further research on the quantification of environmental factors in the future.