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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Cleaner Production Année : 2023

EEIO efficiently sketches large-scale environmental transition plans: illustration by Canada's road industry

Maxime Agez

Résumé

Industries struggle to build robust environmental transition plans as they lack the tools to quantify their ecological responsibility over their value chain. Companies mostly turn to sole greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reporting or time-intensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), while Environmentally-Extended Input-Output (EEIO) is more efficient on a wider scale. In this article, we illustrate EEIO’s efficiency while assessing the impacts of Canada's road industry. OpenIO-Canada, a new EEIO database developed for Canada, coupled with the IMPACT World+ impact assessment method, provides a multicriteria environmental diagnosis of Canada’s economy. The construction sector carries the second-highest environmental impacts of Canadian people (10 to 31% of the impact depending on the indicator) after the manufacturing industry (20-54%). The road industry generates a limited impact (0.5-1.8%), and emits 1.0% of Canadians’ GHGs, mainly due to asphalt mix materials purchases (28%), bridges and engineering structures materials (24%), and direct emissions (17%). The industry must reduce the environmental burden from material purchases - above all concrete and asphalt products - through green buying plans and eco-design and invest in new machinery powered with cleaner energies such as low-carbon electricity. EEIO also captures impacts often neglected in process-based pavement LCAs - amortization of capital goods (machinery, buildings, infrastructure), staff consumptions, and services – and shows their substantial impact: from 15% on marine eutrophication to 73% on freshwater eutrophication. Yet, pavement construction and maintenance only explain 5% of the life cycle carbon footprint of Canada’s road network. The roads' use stage emits 95% of the life cycle GHGs. Vehicle tailpipes release 72% of the GHG emissions while manufacturing vehicles bring the 23% left. Thereby, a carbon-neutral pathway for the road industry must firstly focus on reducing vehicle consumption and wear through better design and maintenance of roads.
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jeudi 12 juin 2025

Dates et versions

hal-04620687 , version 1 (21-06-2024)

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Anne de Bortoli, Maxime Agez. EEIO efficiently sketches large-scale environmental transition plans: illustration by Canada's road industry. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2023, 388, pp.136039. ⟨10.1016/j.jclepro.2023.136039⟩. ⟨hal-04620687⟩
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