Evaluation indexes system has been put forward in this paper for quantifying thesystematical energy consumption, resources consumption, total emissions’ change and waste disposal capacity in road construction with recycled waste materials involved. With help of this evaluation indexes system, the contributions to environmental improvement caused by recycling waste materials in road construction can be quantified through calculating savings on environmental impact potentials, savings on energy consumption, on virgin materials’ consumption and waste disposal capacity provided by road construction. Based on the construction project of a road section numbered No.20 EWK0+400 ~ EWK0+600 of North highway to Shanghai Pudong international airport, which was the first trial project of using several kinds of recycled waste materials including bottom ash from incinerators to replace commonly used materials such as gravel in large scale in road pavement, the results of the four indexes, namely, savings on energy consumption and virgin materials’ consumption, environmental impact potentials as well as waste disposal capacity were obtained. It was found out that with multi recycled waste materials replacing part of the common construction material, systematical energy consumption can be reduced by 30%, a large amount of virgin resource consumption can be avoid and road construction also provides a remarkable large “dumping site” for solid wastes; while at the same time environmental impact potentials were saved for most impact categories except for increase in Ecotoxicity, water chronic, which was caused by heavy metals’ leaching and can be prevented by pre-treatment. Those results are useful for guiding the utilization of recycled waste materials, as well as for developing new technology process and advanced materials in road construction.
Sustainable Panels Made with Industrial and Agricultural Waste: Thermal and Environmental Critical Analysis of the Experimental Results
