Hybrid life-cycle inventory for road construction and use

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a technique that is used worldwide by clients and their design team to assess the impact of<br />their projects on the environment. The main advantage of LCA is in supporting decision making with quantitative data. LCA inventories<br />can be either fully developed or streamlined. Fully developed LCAs are time-consuming and costly to prepare. Streamlined LCAs can be<br />used as an effective decision-making tool when considering environmental performance during the design process, but with a loss of<br />inventory completeness. Acknowledging the advantages and disadvantages of both types of LCA, this paper proposes a hybrid LCA<br />method that uses input-output data to fill in those gaps routinely left in conventional LCA inventories.<br />