Sustainability Metrics of Two Pavement Rating Systems Developed in Canada

Sustainability is an increasingly important consideration in road building across North America. Pavement sustainability can be evaluated using several different methods or tools, including life cycle assessment, life cycle cost analysis, performance assessment, and sustainability rating systems (SRS). A SRS is basically a list of sustainability best practices with a related measure, usually a point score, which quantifies each best practice in a common unit.
In an effort to bring awareness of and promote “green” initiatives to designers, both the Ontario Ministry of Transportation (MTO) and Golder Associates created user-friendly SRS to promote sustainable pavement technologies for the design, construction, rehabilitation, reconstruction, and preservation of roads. The MTO system is known as GreenPave and the Golder system as GoldSET.
This paper describes the development and implementation of these two SRS and compares their analysis through two case studies, one dealing with a rigid pavement rehabilitation project and the other addresses a flexible pavement project.