Recommended to Include Relevant Material Performance in the Construction Material Environmental Product Declarations

The use of cradle-to-gate environmental product declarations (EPDs) can be an important part of the implementation of life cycle thinking to improve the sustainability of civil infrastructure. The use of EPDs in procurement of materials for civil infrastructure has been of increasing interest to state and local agencies, and implementation has been driven in part by legislation. However, EPDs need to be specified and managed well to make them an efficient and reliable tool for helping to improve environmental sustainability. In 2023, a white paper was published reviewing the use of EPDs, provided a summary of several important problems identified with the approach that has been implemented to date, and offered recommendations to improve the practicality of EPDs, reduce their cost, and increase the environmental improvements that they can help produce. One of the recommendations was to use a full life cycle perspective capturing the performance of the materials for well-informed decision making. This is because transportation of materials from the manufacturing site to the construction site are not considered in cradle-to-gate EPDs. Furthermore, a material that has a lower cradle-to-gate impact may not last as long, may require more maintenance, or may not be equally recyclable at the end of life as an alternative material and, therefore, might produce more impacts over the life cycle. In this paper, a full pavement life cycle assessment is performed to demonstrate quantitatively the arguments above.