
Recycling, lower production temperature and durability of asphalt are investigated.The environmental impact of the application of warm mix asphalt technologies, on the other hand, depends on the technique used. It was found from the review that using reclaimed asphalt pavement in new bituminous mixtures might yield significant environmental gains. The three approaches and their implementation in the road sector in Flanders (region in Belgium) are described and the main findings from life cycle assessment studies on these subjects are discussed. Life cycle assessment is necessary to adequately assess the environmental impact of these approaches over the entire service life of the bituminous pavement. Attention should be drawn to the possible shift in environmental impact between various life cycle stages, more » e.g., raw material production, asphalt production, or waste treatment. Environmental impact assessment of these methods is necessary to be able to compare these approaches and understand better the ability to reduce the environmental impact during the life cycle of the road pavement. The focus is on (1) reusing reclaimed asphalt pavement, (2) reducing the asphalt production temperature, and (3) prolonging the service life of the pavement.

This paper provides a critical review of different approaches applied in the Belgian asphalt sector in order to reduce the environmental impact of bituminous road construction works. This review concludes with a comprehensive list of recommendations for future research, which shed light on where improvements in knowledge can be made that will benefit the accuracy and comprehensiveness of pavement LCAs moving = , These gaps include: the use phase (rolling resistance, albedo, carbonation, lighting, leachate, and tire wear and emissions), asphalt fumes, feedstock energy of bitumen, traffic delay, the maintenance phase, and the end-of-life phase. This review also identifies common data and modeling gaps in pavement LCAs that should be addressed in future work. This review identifies five key issues in the current body of work: inconsistent functional units, improper system boundaries, imbalanced data for asphalt and cement, use of limited inventory and impact assessment categories, and poor overall utility.

The review finds that pavement LCA is an expanding but still limited research topic in the literature, and that the existing body of work exhibits methodological deficiencies and incompatibilities that serve as barriers to the widespread utilization of LCA by pavement engineers and policy makers. This report provides a critical review of existing literature and modeling tools related to life-cycle assessment (LCA) applied to pavements.
