Sustainability Assessment of Concrete Pavements with Recycled Concrete Aggregate

In the past decade, increasing attention has been given to paving the roads with concrete mixtures due to their numerous advantages over bituminous roads. Further benefits could be expected by incorporating recycled-concrete aggregates from demolition waste (DRCA) in concrete pavements. In the present study, life cycle assessment (LCA) is used as a tool to illustrate the calculation of the environmental impacts of concrete pavements made with DRCA and comparison with those of conventional concrete pavements, for both low- and high-volume applications. It was found that, for mix designs taken from the literature, the replacement of natural coarse aggregates with DRCA for high-volume roads could result in an increase in the environmental impacts (CO2 emission and embodied energy) whereas the impacts could be similar for low-volume roads.