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 oftheir projects on the environment. The main advantage of LCA is in supporting decision making with quantitative data. LCA inventoriescan be either fully developed or streamlined. Fully developed LCAs are time-consuming and costly to prepare. Streamlined LCAs can beused as an effective decision-making tool when considering environmental performance during the design process, but with a loss ofinventory completeness. Acknowledging the advantages and disadvantages of both types of LCA, this paper proposes a hybrid LCAmethod that uses input-output data to fill in those gaps routinely left in conventional LCA inventories.