Evaluation and Documentation of Production and Reduction Methods for Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Flexible Pavements

The United States Government has committed to improving the nation’s preparedness and resilience to the effects of a changing climate by targeting net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the year 2050 and limiting global warming to an increase of 1.5 ℃. The Department of Defense’s (DOD) role is to develop strategic processes to ensure net-zero emissions from the federal procurement. The DOD’s Climate Adaption Plan outlines five Lines of Efforts (LOEs). LOE 1 considers social costs of GHG emissions in cost-benefit and life-cycle analyses, and LOE 4 deploys GHG emission reduction construction technologies. This paper synthesizes GHG emissions data from the literature to provide a range of expected (baseline) GHG emissions associated with a flexible pavement’s life cycle from documented and published sources. This paper also explores opportunities for reducing GHG emissions that were identified in the literature. A second paper will formalize strategies for reducing GHG emissions for the flexible pavement life cycle and develop GHG emissions associated with optimized strategies.