Life Cycle Assessment of Bridges

Tanmay Preman

Abstract

The point of any engineering design is to optimize the aggregate cost of the structure
without trading off the functional requirements while augmenting the utility of the structure
to the users specifically and to the general public by and large. The construction sector is
attracting increasing attention due to its high environmental burden. For example, in 2015,
the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) owned more than 29000 bridges.
With the rapid development of infrastructure, the sustainability and environmental
performance of these bridges is raising concerns from the public, stakeholders and
authorities. Bridges, as the fundamental structural elements of transportation networks, not
only have long life spans, but also consume large amounts of natural resources and energy
in their construction and maintenance. For instance, the greenhouse gases generated from
producing a cubic meter concrete has estimated equivalent to a person traveling 1000 km
by car (Ecoinvent v2.2) or 4000 km by an Airbus A320. Consequently, in addition to
economic and technical aspects, there are strong motivations to increase the focus on
environmental sustainability for bridges (Du, 2015). This is the basis for development and
application of Life Cycle Assessment. This paper discusses in brief the concept of
Lifecycle Analysis of a bridge to estimate the environmental impact.

1. Introduction

A nation’s economic strength is reflected in its infrastructure assets. Concrete pavements

and structures such as bridges are key segments of our transportation network, and thus
also fundamental to economic vitality and personal mobility. Of all the infrastructure
components, bridges are the least studied with a long term perspective and also
environmental perspective has not been sufficiently taken into account. Bridge building is
a major activity. Planning, design and construction take years, and they are not only
expensive, but much emission and waste are generated via this capital investment. In
addition, bridges require regular maintenance and rehabilitation throughout their life. Poor
roadway conditions persist despite heavy economic and material investment in highways
and roads. The magnitude of investment in the repair and maintenance underscore the need
to approach road building and repair from a new perspective—long term and preventive,
rather than short term and corrective. Lifecycle assessment (LCA) and Lifecycle cost
analysis (LCCA) methodologies provide the means for this kind of evaluation.

Bridge superstructure design and material selection has traditionally been based on
engineering requirements, initial and life cycle costs, experience with and availability of a
particular material or technology, aesthetics, and the ability to erect the structure under
local environmental conditions (climate, topography, etc.). With the increasing interest of
the public, industry, and government m sustainable development, environmental
assessment in construction is becoming more important. The environmental assessment of
the materials is best performed using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). (B. A. Horvath &
Hendrickson, 1998)

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive, standardized and internationally

recognized approach for quantifying all emissions, resource consumption, related
environmental and health impacts linked to a service, asset or product (Treloar, et al., 2000;
ISO 14040, 2006; ILCD, 2010). Although LCA has a broad application in various industries,
its implementation on bridges is rare and needs more investigation. Most previous studies
have only considered few indicators or structural components, or a specific life stage. For
example, either confining the study scope on three selected air emissions of CO2, CO and
NOx or focussing on the energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Due to the complexity
of the environmental problems and bridge structures, robust environmental evaluation of
bridges is far from straightforward. (Du, 2015)

LCA is a framework designed to evaluate the environmental performance of a product or

process throughout its life cycle, including raw material acquisition, production, use, final
disposal or recycling, and the transportation needed between these phases (ISO 1997).
Often, LCA elucidates unseen environmental and social burdens incurred over a product
or system’s lifetime. By quantifying environmental and social burdens, the LCA model
provides the data necessary for comprehensive LCCA.

2. Lifecycle Assessment

Life cycle cost (LCC) is an economic concept based on Life cycle thinking (LCT). LCT is a
systematic approach which intends to consider the products from ‘cradle’ to ‘grave’, from the
raw material extraction, through products manufacture, use and maintenance until the final
disposal. Decisions are needed in each life stage of the product, the application of LCT can
thus help connect all environmental and social issues in an integrated holistic system,
meanwhile avoid the short term policy resulting in the long term unbalanced development, or
transferring the burden from one stage to another, such as saving
money/resource/environmental impact in the initial production phase but leading to the
increase in another phase. Life cycle cost is an economic concept based on LCT, which takes
account of all the monetary costs of a product or service from ‘cradle’ to ‘grave’. Besides, the
equivalent monetary value of LCA can also be transformed and combined into LCC.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the calculation and evaluation of the environmentally
relevant inputs and outputs and the potential environmental impacts of the life cycle of a
product, material or service (SABS ISO, 1998). Environmental inputs and outputs refer to
demand for natural resources and to emissions and solid waste. The life cycle consists of
the technical system of processes and transport routes used at, or needed for, raw materials
extraction, production, use and after use (waste management or recycling) (Environmental
& Information, 2004)

LCA generally has four components. These include:

(i) Goal and scope – includes the intended application and audience, and the
reasons for carrying out the study while describing the scope of the study. This
includes a description of the limitations of the study, the functions of the
 systems investigated, the functional unit, the systems investigated, the system
boundaries, the allocation approaches, the data requirements, data quality
requirements, the key assumptions, the impact assessment method, the
interpretation method, and the type of reporting
(ii) Inventory – data are collected and interpreted, calculations are made and the
inventory results are calculated and presented. These data will then be adapted
and/or weighted to the functional unit, which is defined in the goal and scope,
so that the whole life cycle of the product can be taken into account
(iii) Impact Assessment – the product or production system is examined from an
environmental perspective using category indicators. The LCIA also provides
information for the interpretation phase.
(iv) Improvement Assessment – the Improvement Assessment is the phase where
the results are analyzed in relation to the goal and scope definition, where
conclusions are reached, the limitations of the results are presented and where
recommendations are provided based on the findings of the preceding phases
of the LCA (Following ISO 14043).

A LCA is generally an iterative process (i.e. its stages are repeated as more information is
gathered or systems better understood). The impact assessment helps to increase the
knowledge and understanding about which of the environmental inputs and outputs are
significant. This knowledge can be used in the collection of better data for those inputs and
outputs in order to improve the inventory analysis. The conclusions of the LCA should be
compatible to the goals and quality of the study (Environmental & Information, 2004).

Data are gathered either directly from participants in the life cycle chain of a product or
process, or used from libraries of past LCAs. For these reasons, LCA studies, in general,
have been expensive and time-consuming. If a product is redesigned, the analysis has to be
redone (B. A. Horvath & Hendrickson, 1998).

Among LCA steps, an impact analysis that evaluates many different environmental loads
with the same estimating index is very difficult and near to ideal. Therefore, this has not
been established yet in LCA methodology. Thus, current LCA is mainly performed with
an inventory analysis, which calculates the environmental loads generated from the initial
step of getting raw materials to the final step of waste production, in the form of a detailed
inventory table (Park, Hwang, Seo, Asce, & Seo, 2003).

While doing LCA for bridges, the following set of principles should be applied (A. Horvath
& Ph, 2009):
1. Questions need to be defined carefully – for a good analysis, we need to define the
questions that need to be answered. For example, are we looking for alternative
material or are we comparing bridge designs and so on
2. Full LCA is needed – the environmental aspects of the entire life cycle of bridges
need to be studied, including planning and design, material provision, construction,
maintenance and rehabilitation, end of life, and transportation in all phases. Missing
a life-cycle phase may result in suboptimal decisions
3. Location of analysis is important – many bridge designs are unique, and bridge
construction has local characteristics with respect to what materials are used, where
 they are sourced from, what labor and technologies are available, what topographic
conditions there are, and others.
4. Time horizon – decisions about bridges need current information. Unfortunately,
right now there are many data gaps about bridges wherever they are in the world,
and the decision-maker would be happy to get any kind of information, even if it is
outdated. The situation is even more dire about using novel materials and the
designs which could accommodate them in the future Many times there is little
experience with putting the alternative materials in place and monitoring their
performance over time. LCA has had difficulties with predicting future
performance.
5. All emissions and wastes need to be assessed – a good LCA should quantify the
widest range of environmental inputs and outputs (for example, not just GHGs need
to be considered but also other air and water pollutants), and perform impact
analysis (global warming potential, human and ecological toxicity analysis,
resource depletion assessment)

There are two forms of life cycle inventory analysis methods to quantify environmental
loads—process analysis and input-output (IO) analysis. Process analysis for totaling
environmental loads in every stage of the life cycle has been applied to analyze individual
products and materials. Otherwise, IO analysis, which is based on Leontief’s mathematical
model, has been applied for macroobjects such as urban systems (Park et al., 2003). A
sample life cycle of highways and the system boundary of a study is shown in Figure 1.

The life cycle of highways can be divided into four stages—manufacturing of construction
materials (environmental pollution associated with interindustry activities), construction
(energy consumed by machinery), maintenance/repair (surface repair, structure repair,
damaged road repair, and retarring of damaged land but repair period determination is
convenient only for surface treatment, overlay, and repavement), and the
demolition/recycling stage (Energy is consumed by using fuel and electric power in the
process of transporting and recycling). Energy consumption in each life cycle stage was
quantified, and environmental load was estimated by applying the environmental emissions
factor per each energy source. However, environmental emissions factor can vary
according to the oxidation ratio of each energy source, by how many contaminants are
included, and where they are to be used.
Figure 1: Life cycle of highways and system boundary

4. Conclusions

This research explored the general LCA implementation on bridges Though infrastructure
including highways poses a major part of national energy consumption and is closely tied
to human beings, it is not understood as a whole how much it affects the environment. The
environmental performance of bridges is closely linked with the choice of material and bridge
type. Although different material or bridge types can serve the equivalent function for the
designated project, they have different environmental performance and affect the overall life
cost in the respective manner.

Data was found to be the main obstacle when implementing LCA on bridges. First, the adopted
life cycle inventory database may not totally reflect the applied production technologies.
Second, the results are very dependent on the input, including the material quantities,
construction machinery usage, maintenance schedules and the end-of-life plans. However, this
can be improved if the government requires the manufacture companies to provide the full
environmental profile of their products, which are mostly kept confidential today. The
environmental problems and bridge structures being so complex, vigorous environmental
evaluation of bridges is a tough task.

References

Du, G. (2015). Life cycle assessment of bridges , model development and case studies.
Environmental, I., & Information, M. (2004). Life Cycle Assessment 9.
Horvath, A., & Ph, D. (2009). PRINCIPLES OF USING LIFE-CYCLE ASSESSMENT IN BRIDGE
ANALYSIS, 1–2.
Horvath, B. A., & Hendrickson, C. (1998). Steel versus steel-reinforced concrete bridges: environmental
assessment, 4(September), 111–117.
Park, K., Hwang, Y., Seo, S., Asce, M., & Seo, H. (2003). Quantitative Assessment of Environmental Impacts
on Life Cycle of Highways, 129(February), 25–31.
Singh, D., & Tiong, R. L. K. (2005). Development of life cycle costing framework for highway bridges in
Myanmar, 23, 37–44. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2004.05.010