The Dutch Ministry of Transport has prepared an environmental assessment covering a variety of bridge building materials:

Read the following article: "European Bridge Engineering Conference. Lightweight Bridge Decks, Rotterdam, March 2003". (PDF file)

Read article from Bautechnik, year 80, January 2003, Vol. 1, Pages 32-42:

"Construction material for a bridge with regard to the environment" af MSc. CEng. Ryszard A. Daniel, Ministry of Transport, The Netherlands".

Introduction

Environmental consideration to the choice of construction materials is an issue of growing importance in engineering. In the Netherlands, as in several other countries, the government responds to this issue by promoting materials and technologies which reduce environmental impact of both, public and private projects. However, an assessment of this environmental impact is quite complex, especially with regard to complex construction projects. The existing analytical methods, like LCA (lifecycle analysis, require an extensive data input. These data are usually not known at the stage of material selection.

The following article presents a bridge construction project, in which the building material has been selected using a relatively simple ecological analysis. The number of required data was kept small; and the results were reduced to a very few comparable figures for the considered material options. The most advantageous solution was found in a bridge of pultruded, FGRP (fiberglass reinforced polymers) sections.

Concluding remarks

The environmental analysis applied in this project has been first presented in the Netherlands and in Belgium (20); and later to the international audience of pultrusion specialists (21), (22). It met interest of many professionals; and it caused diverse discussions, which proves that the idea of pro-ecological, so-called “sustainable” projects has broad support of the construction market.

Continuing these discussions is more important than the results of the study presented here. Every construction project is peculiar. Material which offers the best environmental solution in one project, does not necessarily do it in the other. The intention of this article was to present a way in which all these peculiarities can be investigated and quantified in terms of environmental impact – rather than to promote a specific material. The call for thorough environmental consideration to the construction projects is becoming louder. The purpose of this presentation was to contribute to answering this call.

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