Highway routine maintenance carbon dioxide emissions assessment

Civil infrastructure, including the highway maintenance sector, is under increasing pressure to deliver ‘low-carbon’ services. Reducing this sector's ‘carbon footprint’ can help to meet targets set under the Kyoto Protocol. Carbon dioxide emissions reduction is now a legal requirement under the UK's Climate Change Act; infrastructure clients therefore require their supply chains to provide carbon footprint information. A new, more holistic, project-specific carbon footprinting approach is urgently needed to account for carbon in an integrated manner, identifying areas of carbon hot spots and developing a reduction hierarchy to support business decision making. In this paper a process-based carbon footprinting framework based on the PAS2050:2011 protocol is adopted. Results of case studies (focusing on the carbon footprint) of ‘typical’ UK highway maintenance processes are provided, namely pavement resurfacing, pavement marking, bulk lamp changing and grass cutting. These processes were selected across urban, semi-urban and rural site locations to investigate the significance of these locations on the carbon footprint. The results indicate the robustness of the PAS2050-compliant framework for highway maintenance carbon footprinting; areas of carbon hotspots and related reduction opportunities can be identified to inform the reduction hierarchy across the processes value chain. The research presented can be used as a framework to plan, evaluate and manage highway maintenance programmes and carbon budgets over the maintenance processes value chain.