BIM-Based Life Cycle Assessment to Quantify Carbon Dioxide Emissions During Road Construction

Carbon dioxide CO₂ emissions are a major component of greenhouse gases and their evaluation during the service life of infrastructures is increasingly becoming a pivotal index during the project tendering phase. Construction activities largely generate CO₂, among which onsite equipment usage accounts for a large amount in earthwork operations. However, the carbon dioxide emissions deriving from earthwork machineries have not been fully investigated and calculated yet due to the inner complexity of such quantification tasks. This study refers to a real road construction project in Trondheim, Norway as a case study to quantify earthwork volume and calculate the corresponding CO₂ emissions generated by the vehicles employed during the earth moving process. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is adopted to streamline the necessary operations and the generated earthwork modeling can provide accurate data to calculate quantity take-off volumes. Three different hauling machines, namely wheel dozer, tractor scraper, and articulated dump truck are considered based on their economic haul distance. The corresponding carbon dioxide emissions are subsequently calculated and results indicate that the tractor scraper contributes to the highest CO₂ amount while the wheel dozer leads to the lowest value. This study provides an innovative workflow to calculate the carbon footprint generated by earthwork machineries and that can be used as a central decision-making index during the early planning stages of construction activities.