Good afternoon everyone. 
Welcome to the webinar. My name is Kurt Smith with
Applied Pavement Technology, and 
I'll be serving as your host for today's webinar
on An Introduction to Life-Cycle Assessment 
for Pavements, Part I: Fundamentals. 
This is part of an ongoing
series of webinars on sustainability
that were developed under the FHWA
Sustainable Pavements Program and covers
all stages of the pavement life cycle.
before we get started here today I want
To mention just a few housekeeping items,
the webinar itself is scheduled for a
total of one hour and consists of a 50-minute
formal presentation and 10-minute
question-and-answer session.
The questions will be answered at the end of
the formal presentation, but 
you may submit your questions at any time during
the presentation using the
questions box on your control panel.
If you don't see the questions box, 
you may need to click on the orange arrow icon 
on the control panel to display the settings. 
At the end of the session, 
we will work to answer as many of the
questions as we can within the time allotted, 
but because of the volume of questions,
we likely will not be able to
get through all of them. 
However, currently plans are being made to
organize two additional webinar events
to address all of the questions that
have been raised on all of the past
webinar session events. 
Details on those additional webinars will be made
available once the plans are finalized
after the conclusion of the webinar. 
A copy of the presentation will be shared
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with a link to the webinar recording
once it's processed. You may need to
regularly monitor your spam or junk
folders as we found that some of our
webinar communication occasionally gets
redirected there. Throughout today's webinar,
we will be using a number of
acronyms referring to different
materials, products, and processes. 
We'll work to introduce these as they are used
in the slides throughout the webinar, but
this master list will be available in
the presentation that we share with
everyone later. So now to get things started,
I'd like to introduce Monica Jurado
with FHWA,
who will preface our webinar with a
quick look at the FHWA Sustainable Pavements Program. Monica. 
(Monica Jurado) Yes. Good morning to some of you,
and good afternoon. My name is
Monica Jurado, and I want to thank you
for joining us for the Sustainable
Pavement Systems Webinar Series and
welcome you to our ninth webinar: 
An Introduction to Life-Cycle Assessment for
Pavements, Part I: Fundamentals.
Before we get started, I would like to
tell you a little bit about the 
Federal Highway Administration 
Sustainable Pavements Program. Our program began in
2010 to advance the knowledge and
practice of sustainability related to
pavements,
with the vision and mission to advance
the knowledge and practice of designing,
constructing, and maintaining more
sustainable pavements through
stakeholder engagement education and the
development of guidance and tools, 
which this webinar series falls under 
our vision and mission.
Like I mentioned before, this is the
ninth out of our series of ten webinars.
You will receive one 
professional development hour per webinar, and 
upon the completion of eight webinars,
eight out of the ten, you will receive a
course completion certificate.
Through our Sustainable Pavements Program,
we also developed the FHWA Sustainability Ambassadors, 
which is a group of FHWA employees 
from different disciplines
whose goal is to expand the knowledge
and outreach within their field that
complements the Sustainable Pavements Program.
With that I would like to
introduce our speaker for today, who is a
Sustainability Ambassador: Miss Meesa Otani,
who joined Federal Highway in
the Illinois Division Office through the
professional development program.
Following the PDP program, she served as
the Environmental Coordinator for the
Arizona Division from 2010 to 2012.
In 2012,
Ms. Otani moved to the Hawaii Division 
as the Environmental
Engineer,
where she currently manages the
Environmental Program and serves as the
Area Engineer for the Kauai District and
the City and County of Honolulu. 
With that, I'll pass on the microphone to 
Miss Meesa Otani.
(Messa Otani) Good morning everyone or good afternoon
to those of you on the East Coast.
I'm Meesa, as Monica said. I will be
talking about life-cycle assessment. 
Why should you care about LCA? 
Life-cycle assessment is a method to quantify and
improve environmental impacts of
products, processes, or systems. 
It's also being introduced at different 
State Highway Agencies such as the 
Illinois Tollway and the California Department of Transportation.
Material producers also
use LCA to promote environmental
sustainability of products and future
use of LCA is expected to grow
significantly. The way the Illinois Tollway 
uses LCA tools is to evaluate
environmental impacts of materials,
equipment, and construction operations
and uses that information in conjunction
with life-cycle cost analysis and
sustainability rating systems in the
decision-making process. 
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans)
and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality 
are also taking
steps towards requiring Environmental Product Declarations (EPD)
for pavement and
other transportation infrastructure
materials for use in reporting,
benchmarking, and life-cycle assessment
for design and asset management
but not yet as part of procurement.
What can you learn from this presentation?
What is LCA and what are
its possible benefits and uses? 
How do you conduct LCA as applied to pavements? and
What tools and resources are
available? As I mentioned, 
life-cycle assessment is an environmental
assessment tool that is used by several
agencies in the world, including the US.
This presentation will provide you a
short introduction to the current status
of the use of LCA in the US and serves
as a starting point for agencies and
other stakeholders in the pavement
industry to learn about the process,
key issues, and current applications 
of LCA for pavement. So again, we're going
to talk about what is LCA. This section
provides basic information on what it is.
So what is LCA? It's a technique to
quantify environmental impacts of
products and processes.
It considers the entire
life cycle from raw material production
to end-of-life and it covers a range of
environmental impacts including resource
use, energy, emissions, and waste
production. So LCA is a technique that
examines material and energy inputs and
outputs over the entire life cycle of
the product or process.
As I mentioned earlier, life-cycle assessment
is not the same as life-cycle cost analysis.
Life-cycle assessment
quantifies life-cycle environmental impacts;
and life-cycle cost analysis
evaluates life-cycle economic impacts.
So, if you tuned into the last couple of webinars,
it talked about LCCA. 
The benefits of LCCA are going to be further
discussed here. A few examples
highlighting the benefits of conducting
an LCA to improve pavement system sustainability 
are shown on this slide.
We already talked about LCCA, which can be
used to improve the economic component of sustainability.
The environmental aspect--
which is LCA--can lead to reduced
energy usage, reduced noise, and improved
air quality. Also, the social
aspect, can lead to conservation of
natural resources. There is a unique
opportunity to improve the
sustainability of pavement structures
with the potential to deliver tremendous
environmental, social, and economic impacts,
which was mentioned in one of the
earlier webinar series, is considered
the triple-bottom-line. With regard
to those components, LCA
can be used to make informed decisions
when you are going through a process. 
These are some examples of metrics or
priorities or values that may be
considered in each individual pavement
life-cycle stage. For instance, 
for materials production, you might consider
the manufacturing cost or recycled materials. 
In construction, you're going to 
think about worker safety or works zone traffic delay.
At end-of-life, you're
gonna think about reuse and recycleability.
How can LCA be used? 
First, why should you use LCA? It can be used to
quantify the current environmental performance, 
which can be used to
benchmark current practices and materials. 
With those current practices
benchmarked, then you can identify
opportunities to improve the
environmental performance, which can be
evaluated, measured, and tracked 
to then help inform and guide decision making 
at a number of levels, which we
will talk about in the next few slides.
For project-level applications, 
you can determine your pavement structural
and mixture design with the lowest
environmental impact; evaluate strategies
for preservation, maintenance, and rehabilitation; 
develop end-of-life
recycling strategies; and 
evaluate material sources and transportation alternatives.
As part of a network-level application, 
you can determine
environmental impacts of various
pavement management strategies; 
develop targets for environmental goals; 
optimize investment decision-making; and 
integrate LCA indicators into agency
transportation asset management plans,
also known as TAMPs.  Then, 
on the policy level, it can guide development of
specifications and policies affecting
pavement durability, such as changes in
your specified compaction levels for
asphalt pavements, or the use of
supplementary cementitious materials
in concrete pavements. 
What's important to know? 
The results from different LCAs
should not be compared because they are
context-sensitive.
...
Since LCA is performed to
address a specific question for a
specific product or process that
provides a specific function in a
specific geographical location. So, 
all of that just to say: 
No two results from LCA studies should be compared.
An LCA is also just one indicator 
in the decision-making process.
You have to consider other key factors
such as life-cycle agency costs, work zone
safety, user costs, etc. in determining
how you make your decisions as an agency.
What are the steps in the
pavement life-cycle assessment process?
There are four basic steps to the LCA process,
which are defined in the
International Organization for Standardization 14040
(ISO) 
Step one is the goal and scope definition. 
Step two is an inventory analysis. 
Step three is the impact assessment. 
And step four is interpretation. 
...
The first phase of an LCA determines 
key features of the analysis including the
depth and breadth of an LCA, 
which can differ considerably depending on the
overall goal. The scope of an LCA defines
the system boundary of analysis.
So basically, what life-cycle stages
and processes are included in the LCA,
the geographic and temporal boundaries of analysis, 
the functional unit of analysis,
and also determines the
required quality of data. 
Again, all of these depend on the subject and 
the intended use of the LCA. As an example, 
an agency may have the following LCA goal:
To determine the environmental impacts
of a pavement structural design. 
With that goal established, the scope needs to be
defined with a partial list of some of
the items to consider in developing the scope listed. 
Which life-cycle phases are
we going to include in this study?
Is this going to be a cradle-to-gate study
or will this be a cradle-to-grave study?
Are there some pavement life-cycle stages
that will be excluded? 
Will the LCA undergo a critical review? 
What are the system boundaries? 
What are the allocation rules being considered? and
How is uncertainty being handled? 
The key decisions made from this assessment are
typically documented in a goal
and scope document for the LCA being performed.
As you can see on this slide,
...
LCA's plot is similar to the 
life-cycle cost analysis, wherealong the y-axis, 
we would look at agency user costs, and 
for LCA, we are looking at environmental impacts. 
So, this is just a brief example
of different activities to consider
such as initial pavement construction,
or if you're gonna do
asphalt overlay or chip seal, and then the
end-of-life removal of that product. 
Step 2 in the LCA is to perform the 
life-cycle inventory assessment. 
You track all the inputs and outputs from the system.
These are inputs of resources 
and outputs of waste, emissions, and co-products 
are estimated for each
activity to produce this 
life-cycle inventory assessment. 
Resource flows considered are energy and materials,
whereas emission flows are emissions to
air, land, and water.  Step 3 of the LCA
is to translate resource and emission
flows from step 2 into environmental and
health indicators. 
The resource and input and output flows,
which can range from narrowly focusing
on energy and greenhouse gas emissions
to a broader set of impact categories
are translated into selected impact category results. 
The most commonly used
impact categories in the US are based on
the TRACI tool or the 
Tool for a Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and
other environmental Impacts. 
This is a tool developed by the 
US Environmental Protection Agency. On the next slide,
we'll talk about the impact assessment
categories.
As I stated, TRACI is an environmental
impact assessment tool developed by US EPA.
It provides characterization factors
for life-cycle impact assessment,
industrial ecology, and sustainability metrics. 
Characterization factors
quantify the potential impacts that
inputs and releases have on specific
impact categories in common equivalence units.
So, as you can see, 
the categories are ozone depletion, climate change,
acidification, eutrophication, smog formation,
human health impacts, and ecotoxicity. 
The final step for an LCA:
the overall results are summarized
and recommendations are developed for
decision making in accordance with the
goal and scope definition. 
A review, as part of steps 1 & 4 of the LCA process, 
by a carefully chosen group of experts or stakeholders 
is recommended to ensure
that the assessment meets the standards as claimed.
So as part of this step, 
you'd identify your limitations, evaluate
completeness of inventory and assessment,
perform the critical review by a
carefully chosen group of experts and stakeholders,
and then summarize the results,
and develop recommendations for decision making.
What is the agency's role
in conducting pavement life-cycle assessment?
The different agency
responsibilities include 
developing project delivery workflow, 
determining department or personnel in charge of LCA,
identifying decision points for LCA use,
determining data needs and data quality requirements, 
determining who will perform the LCA, 
and then identifying
reviewers and decision makers. 
An agency needs to be actively engaged in the LCA
process to ensure that it is relevant to the agency.
What are the resources
required for an agency to use LCA?
Resources needed vary with the use of
how the agency is going to use LCA, but
they typically rely on the use of LCA expertise
from dedicated internal staff
or hired experts. 
There are a number of commercially available 
LCA software tools, and also
spreadsheet-based tools that include
life-cycle inventory datasets for
pavement that can be used as a starting
point to develop LCA models. 
Some State Highway Agencies
have developed their own
customized LCA software tools with
agency-specific default background data.
Some agency-specific data that you
would need include the analysis period,
the timing performance and material quantities
for each activity, 
mix designs, current and projected traffic volumes,
construction work zone inputs,
construction site equipment usage 
(such as hours, fuel, and electricity),
construction waste treatment,
transportation modes and distances
involved along with fuel usage information
(such as materials hauling and construction),
and then industry data.
You need a background data set 
for materials, plant operations data, 
emission factors for categories of vehicles using the pavement, 
environmental factors for
construction equipment or 
emission factors for construction equipment, 
and also environmental product declarations.
LCA is a very data-intensive process. 
So that's also something that everyone
should be aware of.  Attention must be
paid to data sources and data quality
because basically if you're gonna put
something that's not quality data in,
you're not going to get quality data out.
So, what are some tools available to conduct LCA?
There are several tools
available, each with a unique goal or purpose.
There's not a universal tool
or industry standard. Some examples include
the Illinois Tollway tool,
the Athena Pavement LCA tool, 
the Project Emissions Estimator, GreenDOT,
openLCA, and also the 
Federal Highway Infrastructure Carbon Estimator,
which is going to be presented in a
webinar--hopefully, this summer. 
So look for updates on that. 
Then, also the Federal Highway Pavement LCA tool, 
which is currently
being developed in accordance with the
Pavement LCA Framework that was prepared in 2016. 
FHWA's Pavement LCA tool is 
being developed with input from 
State Highway Agencies with the pavement industry.
In addition, a dedicated group
of potential users from State Highway Agencies,
which is the Pavement Life-Cycle Thinking Task Group
are also
guiding the development of the tool. 
This group is closely involved in all stages
of the development of the tool, and it
will make use of public and open-source datasets.
So, talking about some of the
other tools: the Illinois Tollway tool
includes pavement, structures, drainage,
lighting, and landscaping. 
The PE-2 tool includes greenhouse gas emissions
models for construction, maintenance and use.
And GreenDOT from AASHTO performs
a high-level carbon dioxide calculation
from the operations, construction, and
maintenance activities of State Highway Agencies. 
The openLCA is an open-source LCA tool.
It is being used by the
Federal LCA Commons, which you can find
out more about at www.LCAcommons.gov. 
Where can I find more information? 
I think I turn it back over to Monica? yes.
(Monica Jurado) Some of the products that we have in
regards to the Sustainable Pavements Program
includes our Towards Sustainable Pavements,
Reference Document. We also have an 
LCA Framework Document and all this
information can be found in our website,
which also includes some webinars,
technical briefs that we have such as
technical briefs on pavement sustainability, 
life-cycle assessment, and
others in improving resiliency of pavements, 
and the most important, or
what we call one of our most important documents 
is a 
Sustainable Pavements Program Roadmap.
...
On the next slide, you'll be able to see
the links to the recorded webinars which
you have been receiving through emails
if you participated or requested or
registered for the webinar. 
We would like to invite you to our last webinar, 
webinar 10, which is LCA Part 2,
which is focused on EPDs and PCRs.
EPD are Environmental Product Declarations, 
and PCRs are Product Category Rules. 
That will be July 23.
If you haven't signed up for it, please do so. 
We are adding two more webinars.
We're still in the scheduling process.
It will be webinar 11 and 12,
and it will focus on all the
questions and answers that we did not
get to answer throughout the webinar series, 
for all webinars one through ten.
So, we'll have those available 
for you to register. 
With that, if you have any questions please feel
free to contact Heather Dylla or myself.
Also, feel free to visit our
Sustainable Pavements website at any time.
With that, I'll hand it over back to Kurt
for questions and answers. 
(Kurt Smith) Thank you Monica and thank you Meesa.
We appreciate that overview. 
Again, remember that this is the first part of
a two-part presentation on LCA so we'll
be following up again in a month on the second part. 
This presentation was
intended to be an overview and
give everyone a flavor for
what's involved with LCA.
We've been receiving a few questions, but
I would encourage everyone to submit additional questions.
If anything came up
as we were going through the
presentation material, feel free
to use the question box and submit some additional questions. 
Maybe just to get things started, 
we've got a couple here.
Meesa, I'll direct this to you.
The question is: What are the most common
environmental impact indicators and
which ones are considered to be the most important?
(Meesa Otani) I think I'll turn that over to Heather.
(Kurt Smith) okay.
(Heather Dylla) Sure. That's fine. 
In regards to the impact indicators, 
from the Federal Highway standpoint, 
we don't give you any technical guidance on which is
the most important. 
I just wanted to clarify that.
That's really left to the States.
But, from what we are seeing, 
as far as trends in the states that are either
showing interest in LCA, 
or have regulations that they're using LCA 
to help meet the current state regulations, 
it is usually focused on the greenhouse gas or
climate change impact category, or energy use.
Those two are the ones that tend to be commonly used. 
The best practice is 
to include all the impact categories. 
TRACI has numerous impact degrees 
that Meesa went over 
such as acidification, eutrophication, smog, 
ozone depletion, etc.
because there could be trade-offs amongst them.
So, if you do just focus on one indicator,
you could be missing some of the trade-offs 
in the other indicators,
and not getting the whole picture.
In addition, when you do
focus on just climate change, it would
actually be considered more 
carbon footprinting, rather than LCA. 
LCA really is encouraging looking at all the
potential indicators. 
(Kurt Smith) All right. Thank You Heather.
I think Heather made an important point
that it really depends on the agency
or the user in terms of what may
be most critical for them depending on
whether they have certain goals that
they're trying to achieve may dictate
which of those different indicators
might be the ones that they would be
giving most weight to. 
Let's move on to another question, and I think I'll direct
this one to Heather as well. 
Heather, the question is: What is FHWA's 
view of product
LCI/LCA information from industry associations?
For example, Asphalt Institute 
or Eurobitume? 
(Heather Dylla) That's a good question.
There's was a slide
that mentioned various tools,
and there are various tools out there
and many of them have different data sources.
I think what's unique to the tool
that is being created under FHWA is
we are really trying to work with industry,
what would be the best data
that represents their industry; but then,
we're also trying to encourage
harmonization amongst the industries in
what would be considered some of the
background datasets that they use,
or common background datasets, such as
electricity usage etc. 
So, we recognize that there is not harmonization 
in the approaches that's being used
for these studies, but we're trying to
encourage harmonization, and we certainly
want to work with industry on getting
what is the best data into that tool. 
Some of those conversations, 
particularly to what was mentioned here, 
Asphalt Institute's data or EuroBitume--
the commercial databases.
We're going to be having those discussions.
With regards to commercial databases, 
we believe it should be more--
the data in the tool should be public data.
So, freely available that anyone could access.
And so therefore, we're not
putting in commercial databases per se,
but if the data is in the Federal Commons--
Mesa mentioned the Federal Commons.
It's where all the 
US Federal Government data, or some of
the industry data that is provided to
the LCI database is being published.
So we would be largely encouraging
industry to publish their data in the Commons
and then easily incorporating 
into the tool or work with
industry to get it up in the Commons etc.
to make it more available and easily
implemented into some of the
frameworks and ongoing efforts we have.
So, that I think pretty much covers it. 
With regards to some of the reliability 
and certainty of this data,
right now we're just trying to encourage 
the industry and 
the Federal Government as well to come
together and get better data sets. 
Once we get better data sets, 
I think certainly we want to get more of the
statistical data that's involved with
some of this, if possible as well, 
so that you could do more probabilistic
studies in the future on the LCA. 
But, right now, I do recognize that most of
the studies, which wasn't mentioned
today in environmental product declarations, 
that's another 
potential data source. They are just a
deterministic value versus value with
an average with some standard deviation. 
(Kurt Smith) All right. Thank You Heather.
Let's go back to Meesa.
Meesa, there was a question about
Federal LCA Commons. Maybe you could
talk a little bit more about exactly what that is? 
(Meesa Otani) Sorry, I was on mute. 
The Federal LCA Commons is a community of
practice of LCA practitioners working
within and for the Federal Government 
to align and advance LCA research. 
It also maintains a repository dedicated to
access to and long-term preservation of
Federal LCA data tools and resources.
Heather, aren't you on the LCA comments?
Or you were part of it at one point?
(Heather Dylla) Yes, FHWA is a member of the
Federal LCA Commons along with
Department of Defense, USDA, EPA, 
the National Labs--so Argonne who is largely
responsible for the GREET models, as well
as NREL and many others.  
NIST is involved. 
So, we're all trying to find synergies amongst our efforts,
and harmonize our approaches.
One of the synergies that we found is:
We at FHWA, with this group is, 
we feel that there's a strong need for some
common background datasets to help
create EPDs that potentially could be
used for public procurement. 
So, to do that, we're organizing the group to put
together a Road Map towards background datasets--
these common background datasets.
There's been major efforts made
towards a common electricity background dataset
that should be loaded on the repository soon,
but we definitely need
to tackle transportation. 
That's where I think one of the previous
questions as far as Asphalt Institute
and the petroleum industry related to asphalt, 
there's a little bit of overlap,
and we'll have to work together in 
how we're going to harmonize that,
the transportation flow and then
the byproduct being asphalt from that stream.
(Kurt Smith) Alright, great. Thank You Heather.
Heather, as long as you're on the line here,
let's shoot another question your way.
The question is doing a life-cycle assessment,
should you take into account
a residual value when the service life
extends beyond your analysis period,
similar to what's done on a 
life-cycle cost analysis? 
(Heather Dylla) Say that again one more time.
It helps.  I'm reading them while you say them,
but I didn't catch where this one is on my list.
(Kurt Smith) So, the question is like in
life-cycle cost analysis, where your
service life extends--
service life of one of your rehab treatments for example--
exceeds beyond your analysis period, 
you have a residual value that you account
for that impact. Is a similar type of factor needed
in doing a life-cycle assessment?
(Heather Dylla) Yeah, so in the 
life-cycle assessment, you need to ensure that you
have a functional unit and that the
functional unit--
if you're doing an attributional life-cycle assessment,
where you're comparing one product to the other--
the functional unit needs to be the same.
So, service life is
usually part of that functional unit;
and then you're absolutely correct,
if one has a longer service life than the other option, 
there are techniques
that you can do to account for that, 
so that you are comparing apples to apples. 
The LCA framework does give you some of those options.
So, if you do access the website,
and look at the Federal Highways
Life-Cycle Assessment Framework for Pavements,
it goes into some of the more
details and strategies on how you would account for that.
(Kurt Smith) Great. Thank you.
Let's go back to Meesa.  Meesa there's a
question: Other than Illinois Tollway 
and Caltrans,
are there any highway agencies or
other transportation agencies
actively using life-cycle assessment 
in their decision-making process?
(Meesa Otani) I believe that the 
Arizona Department of Transportation has started
using life-cycle assessment, but
Heather might know more about what other
states are doing. I'm not too sure. 
I know Hawaii is not, but there might be other states doing that.
(Heather Dylla) Yes. Meesa,
you're correct.
Arizona State has shown interest.
They haven't necessarily used LCA in their
decision-making, but they're definitely
showing interest in learning how LCA
could be informative and used. 
So, I feel that they are one of our 
key champions.
There are certainly other states that
are being more being proactive in trying
to figure out how LCA would be used at
their agencies, largely trying to get
ahead of current or proposed legislations 
that may be introduced in their states. 
Some of those states
that have had recent legislations
introduced or are suspecting that some
could be introduced would be
Minnesota, Washington, Oregon all have had
some proposed legislation at the state level 
and in various drafts and versions.
They have been states that
we've been working with. In addition,
there's been some recent--
I know in Oregon there is some recent--
I think it's an executive order and push to
reduce greenhouse gases. 
So, I think Oregon DOT may be looking at LCA
more from a programmatic approach on
where are their hotspots, 
where they could look at reducing their 
greenhouse gas footprints. Maybe not specifically
get to this design level; but due to that
executive order, I know that there's some interest there, 
as well as 
what are some of the other states.
I've seen similar-type
benchmark surveys out of Illinois.
Sometimes the states may contract with a
university to do some of these studies.
I think Illinois was contracted out a
to a university. But, it was again, 
more of: Where are the most of the embedded emissions,
and bodied emissions coming
from in their purchasing? So again, at the
high-level tech benchmarking--
not in the pavement design aspect. 
(Kurt Smith) All right. Thanks Heather. Jumping over now 
on the topic of tools, there are several tools that were highlighted. 
There are some general questions 
about the applicability of some of these tools. 
Are they limited to use just in the US? 
Do they have international applicability?
Maybe I'll throw that one to Heather. 
(Heather Dylla) Sure. 
All the tools are made with different purposes. 
You should always be aware 
of what went into the tool, 
and what is some of the background data, 
and what is the goal and scope of how that
tool was made for. And so like I said, 
the FHWA tool is made specifically. 
The default data would be more geared
towards to US, since it is 
being made by the Federal Highways, in the US.
So, it wouldn't be necessarily made 
that would be applicable to other countries
in the international sphere.
But, that doesn't mean that a lot of the
framework that is being developed--
especially a lot of the work that is
being developed through the Federal Commons.
They're mapping out how the LCA
should be done--
couldn't be easily adapted for international purposes. 
There are two efforts going on at FHWA.
In the LCA tool that was referenced by Meesa,
that is going to be 
out in September is an
Excel-based tool, very similar to RealCost.
The one thing about that tool:
you can add a EPDs into it easily
and so you would be able to
customize that tool to be used at an
international level.
However, what I meant is the
default data right now is geared towards the U.S.
So, you would have
to do a little bit of work to take it and use.
I'm not aware of any global pavement
LCA tool that is applicable to all nations.
I am aware of European tools.
France has one called SEVE.
Netherlands has one called DuboCalc.
I think even there may be some in
Sweden being developed, as well as Spain.
Definitely Europe 
has a lot of activity in pavement LCA.
But, with the second version
of the tool that FHWA is working on, 
with open-LCA, we plan to map out all the
unit processes that would go into an LCA
and upload that framework in open-LCA platform.
So, it's like taking our manual--
the LCA Framework that I referenced earlier--
and actually
digitally putting it all together into an
LCA software platform. 
That would be probably something that is the closest
to a global tool. 
All you would have to do is update the datasets,
through the specific country.
But, it would have all the underlying
framework mapped out in unit processes
that was required. So it should be the
easiest to update. 
But, that's more to support future efforts in this program area.
It's more advanced; and hopefully in the future, 
we could take the interface
that's in the Excel tool and merge it
with the open-LCA platform and
all that framework that are being developed.
(Kurt Smith) Ok. Thanks Heather.
Coming back to you again,
still on the topic of tools--
that seems to be a very popular issue right now.
First of all, there's a question of 
whether you could provide a few more details
about the FHWA pavement LCA tool,
maybe what it includes and whether or
not it's an open-source software. 
(Heather Dylla) So, the pavement LCA tool, 
that we are creating in Excel as I mentioned, 
is not open source. 
Because we can't create software unless we go
through special procedures. 
So, we're just taking Excel and creating an
interface to help facilitate with the calculations.
Similarly, the other effort
that I have mentioned, 
where we're mapping out the framework in open-LCA.
Open-LCA is an open source software and
there is a journal paper that's going to
be published--hopefully in the
near future, if it's not already--
that explains the
underlying language to support further
open source, the API for that particular effort.
So, it is the closest thing to 
an open-source nature that
could be taken and made in that platform. 
But again, we're using open-LCA,
which is open source and using that
software to create the framework and added
in the API that would be needed for pavement LCA.
(Kurt Smith) Alright. 
One more follow up on LCA tools. 
Are any of the currently available LCA tools
capable of handling the use phase impacts?
(Heather Dylla) The one that I'm aware of that
is available with use phase is the 
Athena Pavement LCA tool. 
As far as FHWA stamps on this is, 
we currently have an effort that is looking at the use phase--
and particularly pavement-vehicle interaction.
We're trying to take this in a phased approach. 
So we're starting with a simple...
it's cradle-to-grave
in the fact that you can model
the maintenance activities and the
end-of-life activities in this LCA tool;
however, we're not looking at the use phase
as it pertains to urban heat island issues
as it pertains to stormwater runoff issues 
or your vehicle emissions...
pavement-vehicle interaction 
and vehicle costs, vehicle operating costs.
So, we're not looking
at that yet. In the next phases of the tool
and updates, that's something we
would like to incorporate in the future.
But, as I mentioned, 
we have another effort that is particularly
looking at all the different models for
pavement-vehicle interaction and how easy
and feasible are they to incorporate
into LCA or LCCA in that matter to make decisions.
I don't think we're quite there yet
on what models we would recommend.
So, that's where we stand there.
(Kurt Smith) All right, great. Thank you Heather.
Let's go back to Meesa. 
Meesa, there is a question of whether LCA can be applied
to assess the environmental impact of
different materials technologies. 
For example, the use of a recycled material
versus the use of virgin materials in, 
say an asphalt mixture.
(Meesa Otani) Yeah. I believe that would be as part
of the initial inputs for the raw materials,
that you would consider what
the different inputs and outputs are
from that individual material, 
and that would also be part of your 
pavement design. Then, to manage the
lack of field performance data, you'd have to... 
that's probably one of the issues with
adopting it for a 
specific agency or program is that the
LCA needs to be tailored specifically to
that agency and what the different
parameters are. So, if there's no data,
that's where the data collection would
have to come in. You would need to obtain
quality data in order to get a quality LCA.
But, that's as far as my understanding. 
Maybe somebody else has a better answer. 
(Kurt Smith) Anything to add to that Heather?
(Heather Dylla)
I think you're good. Yeah. You want,
as far as performance life, you'd want to
know what you're comparing and use, 
if it's maybe pavement management systems,
that you could put this up in
parallel to how you would conduct your LCCA. 
So, a lot of the inputs for your
life-cycle cost analysis would be similar, 
other than how much
materials are you using. 
That's a little bit different. 
(Kurt Smith) All right. Another question. I think I'll pose this
one to Heather. Heather, the question is:
What precautions must be taken 
if the majority of the data available
for an LCA is secondary in nature? 
(Heather Dylla) So, when you're using secondary data, 
that means you're using a lot of the inputs
and the data is coming from some other
source that may not be specific to what you're using.
So, you need to be sure 
the interpretation of your results are
in line with the data sources
that you have. What I mean by that is
if you're making a decision
between mix design compared to another mix design, 
you want to be sure that
the differences in the actual results
are coming from the differences in the mix design,
and not from these 
background datasets, potentially. 
So they should be in harmony. 
So what data you need for the study
should be in line with your goal and scope. 
There may be a situation 
where you just don't have the
data to use LCA to determine what you
want in the end. It is an iterative process.
But there is statistical
analysis that you can do; 
and as I mentioned, we want to push to
get more statistical information and
good metadata and data quality on the
background data sources so we can use
this statistical information in our LCA studies
and do more of a probabilistic
analysis as we would recommend with 
life-cycle cost analysis. So, I think that's
its evolution as we start
looking at deploying LCA, it's going to take some time.
(Kurt Smith) All right, thank you. 
Let's jump back to Meesa. 
Meesa, the question is about whether life-cycle cost analysis
and life-cycle assessment should be used together.
Is the goal to use
those together as part of the decision-making process?
(Meesa Otani) I think that
would be up to what your priorities are
in terms of benefits and cost
of the different tools. 
So, if you're considering more of your
environmental impact versus more of your
monetary impact, then that's where you
would weigh those options of what
you're gonna consider. 
But, that's up to the independent agency
to make that decision on 
what they value the most out of
those different measurements.
(Kurt Smith) All right and thanks. 
Kind of as a follow-up to that, there's a question of
what is FHWA's perspective on LCA and
how it would be used by an agency currently.
Is it intended just kind of as
a informational tool or is FHWA looking
eventually for it to be used as part of
the procurement process? 
(Meesa Otani) So, right... go ahead Heather.
(Heather Dylla) Yeah, I can answer that one Meesa. 
I was gonna chime in, but I didn't realize that
he didn't direct it to anyone else.
So, what we are recommending at FHWA is
we're looking at LCA right now and
trying to get State DOTs engaged and
understanding the LCA process.
We're focusing primarily
on education and outreach, 
largely because we're seeing that legislation is
coming down and we would like agencies
to be aware of what LCA is prior to
them being forced to have to do LCAs for
every pavement design.  In addition though,
I do see that the future of LCA would be
to use it for decision making, 
and it could be used in many different ways.
We have a paper that goes into LCA and
how it can be used in your 
State transportation plans, to the NEPA analysis,
and how it can later on be used
in the bidding, and then as builts, 
and how we need to create feedback loops to
transfer this data so that we're
constantly informing all of those
decision-making processes. 
So that's the end goal. If you are signed up to
our newsletters, which I'm assuming most of you are. 
If you aren't, I would
encourage you to go on the website and
become a friend. You'll get references to
when that article is published,
so that you could read and take a look at 
how we see the future of LCA is in transportation
and its decision making.
Right now, we're focused
primarily on the education and building up the data.
I think if you can build up and
get good solid data, core background datasets
that support industry EPDs, 
strong industry averages, that can feed in to 
these LCAs,
then we can use LCA's in bidding or
many different other applications.
(Kurt Smith) All right, thank you. 
I'll direct this one to Meesa. Meesa it's a question about
whether specific pavement techniques or
treatments can be evaluated using LCA. 
In the specific example that the question
raises is something like
mechanical stabilization using say
geosynthetics. Is something like that
capable of being modeled or considered
in a life-cycle assessment?
(Meesa Otani) I believe so. 
I think it considers the pavement design.
If you have instead of an 8-inch base
and then a four-inch overlay or asphalt thickness, 
then if instead you have
something like Tensar or whatever 
as part of your base stabilization, 
I think you would look at a different aggregate production, 
and then also what's the
production for that mechanical
stabilization tool that you're using. 
That's where you would have to compare
the different pavement designs that you can use.
(Kurt Smith) Right and then be able to
document the various environmental
impacts associated with each of the
different approaches.
(Meesa Otani) Yeah, and that's probably where the 
life-cycle cost analysis and
stuff comes in and that's the
considerations that you would be looking at.
(Kurt Smith) All right, thank you.
Heather I'll turn this next one to you.
The question is if an agency wants to
use a multi-attributed LCA indicator,
has anyone estimated the
relative weights of some of the different indicators? 
(Heather Dylla) We don't
have any recommended weightings as far
as the Federal LCA Commons and work
that we're doing. 
I've heard that was one of their needs or wants and
desires of the Federal and State Government
but heard that there may be some
challenges in doing so. 
So, I don't have anything to recommend. 
I do know that at least in the past there have
been some weights included in some of
the tools out of NIST that has in there
BIRDS and BEES models that looked at it. 
I think they used other scientific
weightings that had been done in the past,
but that have never been updated
for quite some time. Though, it is
something that the Federal LCA Commons
did discuss in our recent meetings, 
but I don't know if it's where we would be
focusing at this point in time per se,
and we would be leaving it mostly up to
the States to come up with their
recommended weightings.
(Kurt Smith) All right thanks.
I think we're down to just one final question.
Heather, I think you kind of touched on
this already; but 
if an agency is interested in starting to get into this,
where does an agency go to start getting data? 
Does FHWA have a database
that may be available for use? 
So, in our LCA tool, some data will be uploaded in there.
Then, the agency, if they wanted to
they could start requesting EPDs and
they could potentially put EPDs up in there
and start building even more datasets.
But, with regards to how to do that,
I would really strongly encourage
the agency to reach out to FHWA or
Monica Jurado, who's putting on this webinar series,
and they can set up
workshops to help the agency get started.
We do have some one-pagers on the website.
One's particularly for data and
what are the data needs, 
because it is quite a data intensive process; 
and as I mentioned, we are working in creating
that Road Map for Federal background datasets
to start building up some common
background datasets for the future. 
But, it is not an easy one-stop shop of
where you can go to get this data
at this point in time. 
We're hoping to provide the tools that can
meet that need.
(Kurt Smith) Great. Thank You Heather. 
We've reached a milestone here. 
We got through all of the list of questions. 
So, we appreciate everyone raising those questions,
and giving us the opportunity
to respond to those. 
So, we'll just go ahead and close things out here. 
Again, I want to thank everyone for your time
and attention. I hope you found the webinar informative.
We welcome you to
our next--10th and final presentation in
this webinar series, which is scheduled
for July 23rd, and we'll present part two
of this session on pavement life-cycle assessment. 
Thanks again, and so long everybody.
(Heather Dylla) Thank you!
