Environmental, Economic and Social Impact Assessment: Study of Bridges in China’s Five Major Economic Regions (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020
Due to the rapid growth of the construction industry's global environmental impact, especially the environmental impact contribution of bridge structures, it is necessary to study the detailed environmental impact of bridges at each stage of the full life cycle, which can provide optimal data support for sustainable development analysis. In this work, the environmental impact case of a three-tower cable-stayed bridge was analyzed through openLCA software, and more than 23,680 groups of data were analyzed using Markov chain and other research methods. It was concluded that the cable-stayed bridge contributed the most to the global warming potential value, which was mainly concentrated in the operation and maintenance phases. The conclusion shows that controlling the exhaust pollution of passing vehicles and improving the durability of building materials were the key to reducing carbon contribution and are also important directions for future research.
Sustainability Assessment of Bridges – Recent German Research Results
Bridges are designed and built for a scheduled service life of 100 years. At tender stage decision making should no longer only be based on construction costs but on a holistic assessment with regard to sustainability aspects. In the German research project “NaBrü” a bottom-up approach was applied. Within the project environmental and economic aspects were assessed with the methods of LCA (Life-Cycle Assessment) and LCC (Life-Cycle Costing). In addition to LCA and LCC external effects were investigated in detail. Three different types of reference bridges and additionally different construction variants were studied over the entire life-cycle. Based on the results specific characteristics of bridges were pointed out regarding sustainability assessment. In this paper the current state of the art of sustainability assessment for bridge constructions in Germany is shown. Recent research results are summarized and conclusions for highway bridges given.
Social Impact Assessment Comparison of Composite and Concrete Bridge Alternatives
Sustainability, 2022
The definition of sustainability includes three fundamental pillars: economic, environmental, and social. Studies of the economic impact on civil engineering infrastructures have been focused on cost reduction. It is not necessarily in line with economic sustainability due to the lack of other economic factors. Moreover, the social pillar assessment has been weakly developed compared to the economic and the environmental ones. It is essential to focus on the social pillar and evaluate clear indicators that allow researchers to compare alternatives. Furthermore, bridge life cycle assessment studies have been focused on concrete options. This has resulted in a lack of analysis of the impact of composite bridge alternatives. This study is conducted in two stages. The first part of the study makes a cradle-to-grave social and environmental sustainability evaluation with the SOCA v2 and ecoinvent v3.7.1 databases. This assessment is carried out on four concrete and composite bridge alternatives with span lengths between 15 and 40 m. The social impact weighting method and recipe have been used to obtain the social and environmental indicators. The second part of the study compares the results obtained from the social and environmental assessment of the concrete and the composite alternatives varying the steel recycling rate. The bridge alternatives are prestressed concrete solid slab, prestressed concrete lightened slab, prestressed concrete box-girder, and steel–concrete composite box-girder. The results show that composite options are the best for environmental impact, but the concrete box girder solutions are better for social impact. Furthermore, an increase in the steel recycling rate increases the social impact and decreases the environmental one.
SUSTAINABILITY LIFE CYCLE DESIGN OF BRIDGES IN AGGRESSIVE ENVIRONMENTS CONSIDERING SOCIAL IMPACTS
International Journal of Computational Methods and Experimental Measurements, 2021
The establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 claims for a deep paradigm shift in the way infrastructure structures are conceived. The evaluation of the impacts derived from the construction, the service and the end-of-life stages of an infrastructure is consequently in the spotlight of the research community. Being the construction sector as one of the main stressors of the environment, great attention has been recently paid to the structural design from the economic and the environmental point of view. However, sustainability requires to consider the social dimension as well. The evaluation of the social impacts of products is still at a very early stage of development, so the inclusion of social aspects in the design of structures is often overlooked. In this study, a comparison of life cycle assessment results is conducted on seven different design alternatives for a bridge in a coastal environment. Two approaches are followed: the first approach considers the economic and the environmental aspects of each design and the second approach includes the several social impacts specifically developed for the assessment of infrastructures. These social impacts account for four stakeholders, namely workers, consumers, local community and society. Results show that the inclusion of social aspects shall lead to different preferred options when compared with conventional, two-dimensional approaches. Here, the design with silica fume added concrete performs 11% better from a sustainability point of view when compared with the best solution resulting from a conventional assessment.
Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Bridge Design: A Review
JOURNAL OF CIVIL ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT, 2020
Sustainable design of infrastructures has become a major matter of study since the recent establishment of the Agenda 2030. This paper provides a systematic literature review on the use of multi-criteria decision making techniques used so far for the sustainable design of bridges. Special attention is put as well on how the reviewed studies assess the sustainable performance of bridge designs along their life cycle from the economic, the environmental and the social perspective. Although SAW and AHP are recurrently used in the sustainable assessment of bridges, the analysis of the most recent articles show that the application of TOPSIS and PROMETHEE techniques are gaining increasing relevance for such purpose. Most of the studies focus on the research of the construction and the maintenance stage of bridges. However, a need for further analysis is identified when it comes to the assessment of the impacts resulting from the End of Life cycle stage of bridges from a sustainable point...
Environmental and Social Impact Assessment of Optimized Post-Tensioned Concrete Road Bridges
Sustainability, 2020
Most of the definitions of sustainability include three basic pillars: economic, environmental, and social. The economic pillar has always been evaluated but not necessarily in the sense of economic sustainability. On the other hand, the environmental pillar is increasingly being considered, while the social pillar is weakly developed. Focusing on the environmental and social pillars, the use of methodologies to allow a wide assessment of these pillars and the integration of the assessment in a few understandable indicators is crucial. This article is structured into two parts. In the first part, a review of life cycle impact assessment methods, which allow a comprehensive assessment of the environmental and social pillars, is carried out. In the second part, a complete environmental and social sustainability assessment is made using the ecoinvent database and ReCiPe method, for the environmental pillar, and SOCA database and simple Social Impact Weighting method, for the social pillar. This methodology was used to compare three optimized bridges: two box-section post-tensioned concrete road bridges with a variety of initial and maintenance characteristics, and a pre-stressed concrete precast bridge. The results show that there is a high interrelation between the environmental and social impact for each life cycle stage.