Improving the environmental performance of an earthwork project using cleaner production strategies

A quantitative assessment of the environmental impact of construction activities is useful to identify the main environmental impacts and to improve their environmental footprint. This study presents the life cycle assessment of an earthwork project. The results show that earthwork activities entail important environmental impacts; mainly energy consumption, global warming and human toxicity. This study proposes and implements cleaner production strategies, based on the hierarchy of waste management, to improve the environmental performance of the earthwork project. The approach allows reducing the amount of soil to be used by the earthwork project. Moreover both the diesel consumption and the greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by about 41%. This coincides with a saving of about 1.76 million dollars.

► In this work is evaluated the environmental performance of an earthwork project. ► By means of CP strategies are reduced the GHG emissions of the project. ► The CP strategies also reduce the economic costs of the project.