Assessing Environmental Impact Indicators in Road Construction Projects in Developing Countries

Abstract

Environmental pollution is considered to be one of the main concerns in the construction industry. Environmental pollution has become a major challenge to construction projects due to the huge amount of pollution caused by construction projects. There are different types of environmental impact indicators, such as the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint, eutrophication potential (EP), acidification potential (AP), human health (HH) particulate, ozone depletion, and smog. Each of these environmental impact indicators can be linked to different phases of the construction projects. The overall environmental impact indicators can be divided into direct, indirect, and operational emissions. This paper presents a Building Information Modeling (BIM)-based methodology for the assessment of environmental impacts in road construction projects. The model takes into account the overall life cycle of the road construction project, which is divided into: manufacturing phase, transportation phase, construction phase, maintenance phase, operational phase, recycling phase, and deconstruction phase. A case study is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model. The proposed model solves a major problem for road construction project teams who want to assess the environmental impact indicators associated with their project prior to the start of the execution of their projects.

A systematic review of indicators to assess the sustainability of road infrastructure projects

“…The two most frequently used criteria are socio-ecological system integrity and livelihood security and opportunity. The criterion socio-ecological system integrity is often used to develop indicators that refer to project effects across scales from climate change and ozone layer depletion at a global scale [11,24,48,55,71], to soil and local water quality at a fine spatial scale [45,60,81]. The criterion socio-ecological system integrity is associated with the indicators concerning the mitigation of species habitat fragmentation, land use management, and pollution prevention.…”

“…The criterion livelihood security and opportunity is adopted to construct indicators related to the socioeconomic effects of projects. These indicators can be grouped into mobility and accessibility improvement, community livability [9,16,24,45,48,55,57,84], and societal wellbeing and equity [10,21,36,42,71]. Several indicators concern intergenerational equity (e.g., direct and indirect effects on employment), and transportation costs are also derived from the criterion [42,71].…”

Estimating carbon emission of rigid pavement: a case study of Palur Flyover

“…Environmental pollution has been considered as the main contributors to the global warming. There are various types of environmental impact indicators, such as greenhouse gas (GHG) traces, eutrophication potential (EP), acidification potential (AP), human health particles (HH), ozone depletion, and haze [1]. The environmental pollution has also been considered as a major challenge in the construction industry.…”

Life Cycle Analysis of Road Construction and Use

“…With different analysis periods and functional units, they examined the environmental impacts of road materials [16][17][18][19][20] and compared construction techniques and maintenance activities [10,[21][22][23][24][25] with different methods and software. Marzouk et al [21] used the software Copert 4 [26] to assess the overall environmental impacts and primary energy associated with earthwork and pavement processes. Hammervold [22] applied the impact assessment method ReCiPe [27] to construction and maintenance activities of two highway projects in southern Norway in order to identify the main aspects affecting LCA results.…”