Low-carbon technologies’ impact on highway emissions: Cement and steel sectors

Abstract

The implied carbon emissions in highway construction attract increasing concerns due to its large consumption of carbon intensive materials, dominated by cement and steel. There is an urgent need for highway construction companies to reduce the climate risk from the supply chain. This study first proposed a novel method to assess the impact of low-carbon cement and steel technologies on highway construction emissions, in accordance with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Life Cycle Assessment method. The impact of 314 combinations formed by twenty types of cement technologies and sixteen types of steel technologies on carbon emissions from six subprojects of a real highway in China was identified. The findings show that the strong combination of cement and steel technologies can help reduce 32.4 % of total emissions from the highway project, but the main sources of highway construction carbon emissions have not been changed. On one hand, this underscores the potential of responsible consumption and production to support climate action; on the other hand, it indicates that further innovations in carbon reduction technologies related to subprojects themselves are still needed to achieve deep decarbonization.