Greenroads: A Sustainability Rating System for Roadways

Greenroads (www.greenroads.us) is a proposed standard for quantifying sustainable practices associated with the design and construction of roadways. It is a performance metric that awards points for approved sustainable choices/practices and can be used to certify roadway projects based on the achievement of a list of project requirements and the total points earned. Such a standard can: 1) allow informed sustainability decisions, 2) provide a quantitative means of sustainability assessment, 3) stimulate improvement and innovation in roadway sustainability, and 4) provide baseline sustainability standards. This paper describes Greenroads version 1.0, which consists of 11 Project Requirements, 37 Voluntary Credits (for a total of 108 points) and a Custom Credits section. Specific attention is paid to: 1) how the system works, 2) the development cycle in the coming years, and 3) how sustainable concrete pavement solutions fit into the performance metric. Specifically, the direct use of concrete and concrete contractors can earn up to 42 Voluntary Credit points available (39% of the total). Specific concrete-related Greenroads work in the future includes investigation of potential Voluntary Credits covering design-for-deconstruction, ENERGY STAR label cement plants and recognizing recycled content in Portland cement manufacturing processes.

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  • English

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  • Accession Number: 01226241
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS
  • Created Date: Nov 17 2010 7:23AM