Selection of a Pavement Structure from Technically Established Alternatives Based on Construction Cost, Energy Consumption, and Carbon Footprint

This paper presents a procedure to select a pavement structure from technically established alternatives. The general proposed process relies on calculating the present worth of total cost resulting from construction, maintenance/rehabilitation, energy consumption and carbon footprint during those activities as well as recycling of the materials at their end life. However, depending on data availability, the general process could be reduced to just the construction phase as is the case in most developing countries where required pavement performance data is scarce. The reduced procedure was validated on four types of pavements for six traffic levels and three subgrade types. Under the conditions considered in this study, it was found that concrete pavements have high construction, embodied energy, and carbon footprint costs (the environmental impact represents about 66% of the total cost) as compared to other pavement types. Full-depth asphalt pavements were found to be the best ecological type, their construction cost is a little higher than the environmental one with a distribution of about 53% and 47%, respectively. Inverted pavements seem to be a good alternative to weak subgrades although the costs associated with environmental effects contribute to about 52% of the total cost.