Enhancement of sustainable road design towards compatibility between pavement materials

The need for correctly made comparisons of different pavement materials, regarding cost-efficiency to reduce the climate impact, is increasing, especially in connection with new types of climate-neutral materials, so that sub-optimizations and oblique competition do not arise. Both the Swedish and USA's authorities are beginning to demand the Environmental Product Declaration (EPDs) as a certificate of the pavements' environmental performances from the contractors. There are some methodological difficulties to use the EPDs for comparison of the environmental impacts between different asphalt mixes or between the asphalt- and concrete pavements. This paper has analyzed two new standards which propose to extend the declaration to several aspects of sustainability: technical, environmental and economic performance. In this article, we have investigated if these standards can be used to form a framework to create an extended sustainability declaration of road pavements allowed a multidisciplinary comparison of different materials based on technical performance, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA).