Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Lighting Systems and Road Pavements in an Italian Twin-Tube Road Tunnel

Giuseppe Cantisani, Paola Di Mascio and Laura Moretti
Additional contact information
Giuseppe Cantisani: Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00184 Rome, Italy
Paola Di Mascio: Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00184 Rome, Italy
Laura Moretti: Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00184 Rome, Italy

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 11, 1-18

Abstract: This work calculates and discusses the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of four scenarios composed of two types of road pavements and two types of lighting systems to be built in an Italian twin-tube road tunnel. A 20-year time horizon is adopted to assess the burdens of construction and maintenance of both flexible and rigid pavements and high-pressure sodium (HPS) and light-emitting diode (LED) lamps, traffic, and switching on of lamps. All considered scenarios are comparable with each other in terms of technical performances, but significantly differ regarding their environmental consequences. The geometrical and technical characteristics of the examined scenarios comply with current Italian standards for highways. In all the examined cases, LCA is carried out according to the European standard, EN 15804, and includes 19 impact categories (IC). The analysis demonstrates that the use of more reflecting surface pavement materials (i.e., concrete vs. asphalt) and more performing lighting systems (i.e., LED vs. HPS) can effectively mitigate the deleterious burdens related to road construction, maintenance, and use. For most of the examined ICs, the most environment-friendly scenario has LED lamps and concrete pavement.

Keywords: tunnel lighting; light-emitting diode; high-pressure sodium; EN 15804; LCA; road tunnel (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/11/4165/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/11/4165/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:11:p:4165-:d:182314

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().