| Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a technique that is used worldwide by clients and
their design team to assess the impact of their projects on the environment. The
main advantage of LCA is in supporting decision making with quantitative data.
LCA inventories can be either fully developed or streamlined. Fully developed
LCAs are time-consuming and costly to prepare. Streamlined LCAs can be used as
an effective decision-making tool when considering environmental performance
during the design process, but with a loss of inventory completeness.
Acknowledging the advantages and disadvantages of both types of LCA, this paper
proposes a hybrid LCA method that uses input-output data to fill in those gaps
routinely left in conventional LCA inventories. The developed hybrid LCA method
is demonstrated using a life-cycle energy study of eight different road designs,
including vehicle manufacture, maintenance, replacement, and operation. It was
found that the road construction process was initially the most important, but
in the long run the manufacture, use, and maintenance of vehicles using the road
(which are an inevitable consequence of road construction) became paramount. |
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