ABSTRACT
In the United States the transportation sector generates 27% of total US Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG) of which, aircraft account for 8.2% of the total (Federal Highway Administration 2015b). The US has an estimated 13,112 airports (Federal Aviation Administration 2015a). Airports world-wide (U.S.) process 3.3 billion passengers (838 million), 3.6 trillion passenger-miles (963 billion) and 55 million short-tons of freight annually, driving approximately 3.0% of the worlds GDP (International Civil Aviation Organization 2014; Senguttuvan 2011). Significant quantities of environmental impacts are produced from the transportation sector. Quantifying these impacts requires a transparent method, more specific than rating systems. Many rating systems currently exist for facilities with a limited number for infrastructure. These rating systems help agencies and other organizations find sustainable and innovative solutions to minimize their impacts on the environment. Currently, airport pavements do not have such rating systems or methods to quantify environmental impacts. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method to quantify these environmental impacts from processes and projects throughout its life (Santero N. J. 2009). LCA studies/tools have been completed and developed for highway pavements, such as PaLate (Horvath 2004), PE-2 (Mukherjee & Cass 2011), Athena Pavements LCA (Athena Sustainable Materials Institute 2013), and recently the Illinois Tollway tool, ICT-LCA (Al-Qadi et al. 2015) but airport pavement LCA studies and tools are needed. LCA-AIR opens the field for improvements and expansion. Using a LCA methodology, LCA-AIR analyzed three different rehabilitation strategies for Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (ORD) taxiways. LCA results can be used in conjunction with other tools available to airport owners, operators, engineers and contractors to make educated decisions regarding infrastructure investment and their influence on environmental impacts.
