Dalia Said will be available to discuss the poster entitled Building Sustainable Pavements: Life Cycle Assessment Using a Pavement Sustainability Tool at one of this year's poster sessions at the 2011 TAC Conference and Exhibition.   The information presented in the poster is based on a paper she co-authored with Franck Portalupi, M.Sc., P. Eng., Environment Canada, Wayne Trusty, M.A., Athena Sustainable Materials Institute and Chris Goeman, P.Eng., Athena Sustainable Materials Institute at a poster session entitled "Successes in the Pavement Industry".

Roadway pavement constitutes a significant element in the infrastructure system supporting the transportation network of developed countries. There is a growing need to quantify and minimize the impact of this infrastructure element on the environment, especially with the emerging green initiatives. The Athena Sustainability Materials Institute and Morrison Hershfield are working on an Infrastructure Sustainability Tool with the objective of developing and facilitating transfer of enabling technology to allow decision-makers and design teams to readily assess highway/pavement design options from life cycle environmental and cost perspectives. The project is sponsored by Environment Canada under the Asia Pacific Partnership (APP) program in keeping with the Ministry’s desire to build, strengthen and maintain Canada’s linkages with the international community on global environmental and sustainable development issues. The immediate focus of the project is on developing tools to facilitate highway/pavement design to minimize life cycle environmental and cost impacts in Canada as well as in other countries. The Impact Estimator will be capable of performing life cycle assessments (LCA) for a variety of road cross-sections each of varying length within a single project.  The tool covers material extraction, production and transportation, initial construction, and scheduled maintenance and rehabilitation of a cross-section of a designated roadway. The ability to model multiple road cross-sections of varying length will facilitate a more accurate modeling and hence comparison of practical road designs.