NDLI: Life cycle assessment of non-traditional treatments for the valorisation of dry soils in earthworks

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Blanck, Gaëtan Cuisinier, Olivier Masrouri, Farimah
Copyright Year	2016
Abstract	Sustainable development principles are leading earthwork companies to use all-natural materials extracted from the construction site to build the infrastructure. Natural materials with low characteristics must be improved. For dry soils, the common solution is to increase the compaction energy or add important quantities of water to reach the target dry density and bearing capacity. To reduce the environmental impact of their activities, the use of industrial organic products has been proposed. The aim of this study was to assess the potential benefits that could be expected from the use of these non-traditional treatments in earthworks with a well-recognised environmental impact assessment methodology.Three non-traditional products were selected as follows: an acid solution (AS), an enzymatic solution (ES) and a calcium lignosulfonate (LS). For each of these categories, geotechnical properties such as compaction, bearing capacity, unconfined compressive strength and stiffness were first determined. Based on these results, the construction strategy for which non-traditional additives lead to greater improvement of soil properties was defined. The environmental balance of each option was then determined via a comparative process life cycle assessment study that considered ten impact categories.An experimental study showed the ability of enzymatic and lignosulfonate additives to improve soil characteristics with significant savings of water at the construction stage. The purpose of the study was also to compare the global environmental impact of each treatment strategy defined from laboratory investigations. The life cycle assessment results showed that some construction strategies lead to a significant reduction in the environmental impact compared with the reference strategy. However, these environmental improvements are strongly linked to the choice of the construction strategy and site conditions as discussed in the sensitivity analysis.Within the three tested non-traditional additives, enzymatic and lignosulfonate treatments showed an association of technical and environmental interest for the compaction of dry soils. As demonstrated in the sensitivity analysis, these benefits are achieved when the production and transport steps have limited environmental impact. Thus, despite an important transportation distance for enzymatic additive, the small quantities that must be used (0.002 % by dry weight) have a limited contribution on the global environmental impact. In contrast, the production step strongly impacts the treatment with lignosulfonates. Moreover, environmental interest remains strongly dependent on the site conditions and construction strategy, which is why the adopted methodology can accurately perform an initial evaluation before implementing a soil treatment with a non-traditional product.
Starting Page	1035
Ending Page	1048
Page Count	14
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09483349
Journal	The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment
Volume Number	21
Issue Number	7
e-ISSN	16147502
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publisher Date	2016-03-18
Publisher Place	Berlin, Heidelberg
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Compaction Earthworks Environmental impact Life cycle assessment Non-traditional additives Soil treatment Environment Environmental Economics Environmental Engineering/Biotechnology Environmental Chemistry
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Environmental Science

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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