Two important and timely “virtual meetings” the week of March 9th, 2020 provided an opportunity for representatives from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), industry, academia, and other stakeholders to delve into the broad topic of sustainability measures—with essential focal points in life cycle assessment (LCA) and product category rules (PCRs). Eric Ferrebee, Technical Services-American Concrete Pavement Association (ACPA) represented ACPA and provided the following report:
The LCA Meeting was a virtual meeting held Wednesday and Thursday [March 11-12]—originally a planned meeting to have been held in Phoenix, Arizona. The goal of the meeting was to beta test a pavement LCA tool [currently] being developed by FHWA through the Sustainable Pavements Program, a contract with Applied Pavement Technology (APTech), along with TheRightEnvironment, and Professor John Harvey, Ph.D., P.E., Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering-UC Davis.
[Currently] being developed by FHWA, the beta tool allows users to conduct an LCA, utilizing nationwide data (some still being evaluated and collected), while allowing the opportunity to input regionalized or local data based off of environmental product declarations (EPDs).
Although the tool is still being developed, this meeting was to get feedback from [industries] (concrete, asphalt, and aggregates) on the functionality. While finalizing the tool, FHWA and the LCA team will be working on a rollout plan that will include education and training. The first version of this tool is mainly aimed at education. It currently does not feature the use-phase of an LCA, which ACPA has long-maintained is an extremely impactful measure of sustainability, but the FHWA and LCA team hope to include the use-phase in later updates to the tool.
The Product Category Rules (PCR) Harmonization Meeting was another virtual FHWA-sponsored meeting/workshop led by a trio: Amlan Mukherjee, Ph.D., P.E., Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Affiliated Professor, Construction Management-Michigan Tech University; Heather Dylla, Sustainable Pavement Engineer-FHWA; and Latoya Johnson, Team Leader, Pavement Design and Performance-FHWA.
The goal of this meeting was to evaluate the state of pavement material product category rules for all paving materials. These PCRs are only good for a limited time, thus need to be periodically updated and evaluated to ensure accuracy. Updates also help to confirm that the various materials are being treated consistently for proper evaluation. This important process allows us to evaluate what environmental impacts are being attributed to the various paving materials, and ensures that all environmental impacts are being accounted for, which can be an intricate process with byproduct materials.
About PCRs and EPDs:
PCRs are defined in ISO 14025 as a set of specific rules, requirements, and guidelines, for developing environmental declarations for one or more products that can fulfill equivalent functions. PCRs determine what information should be gathered and how that information should be evaluated for an environmental declaration.
Environmental Product Declaration (EPD)s provide quantifiable environmental data to compare products that fulfill the same function. In order to create comparable EPDs, they must follow the rules and guidelines called for in the associated PCR.
For the FHWA report PDF titled “TECH BRIEF: BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE-CYCLE THINKING”, please click on image to right or go to: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pavement/sustainability/pubs/hif19027.pdf