Review and comparison of freely-available tools for pavement carbon footprinting in Europe

Abstract

This paper wants to raise awareness of LCA/CF tools that have been built within European projects in the last 5-6 years and that are freely-available on the internet: asPECT, ECORCE M and CARBON ROAD MAP. The tools will be compared in terms of their architec-ture and system boundaries considered, as well as on the basis of the results of a comparative carbon foot printing exercise of several high content reclaimed asphalt wearing courses. This will provide practitioners with clearer ideas on the benefits and limitations of the existing tools, will provide suggestions to perform the carbon footprinting analyses in Europe and through the com-parison of the results will allow drawing some guidelines for the final user.