Developing a Framework for Life Cycle Assessment of Green Transportation Infrastructure (Railway and Super pavements)

Institute of Sustainability in Civil Engineering (INaB), RWTH Aachen University, Germany

^* Corresponding author: manouchehr.shokri@inab.rwth-aachen.de

Abstract

As well known, the transportation industry and its related infrastructure including railway and roads, require very high construction costs. In addition, the excessive use of natural resources and energy for related construction and maintenance has highlighted the need for adapting purposeful planning with regards to sustainability related impacts. In transportation infrastructure, the focus should be to minimize energy consumption, related Greenhouse Gas emissions and other environmental impacts over their entire life cycle. In this study, a new design of substructure with a layer of recycled Polypropylene (PP) is presented and compared with scenarios using virgin PP and conventional ballast. A model was developed that can adequately evaluate the resource use and environmental effects of various use scenarios of Geosynthetic (recycled Polypropylene) materials in rail construction layers in comparison to primary raw material. The model takes into consideration technical properties investigated through finite element simulations to decouple increase technical performance from environmental impacts. The outcome of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) indicates that the recycled PP scenario causes the lowest environmental impact for a service life of 100 years. On the other hand, the Finite Element (FE) results showed that using reinforced geosynthetics between ballasted layer has better mechanical performance than the conventional ballast track railway.