Recognising the importance of sustainability issues for industry as a whole, the project team and focus group set out to create a ‘sustainability management system’ for the highways sector. Initial scoping prioritised greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions measurement as the key sustainability issue and this became the initial focus of the project: to create a standardised method of measuring the contribution to climate change which highway products and applications make and to achieve endorsement from the sector in doing so.
The first phase of the project, delivering in October 2009, has been concerned with the assessment of GHG emissions, expressed in CO2 equivalents, from the production of asphalt and use of it to construct highway courses. asPECT was produced as a result. In the remainder of the project, which runs until March 2011, it is hoped that further modules will be developed to extend asPECT to include the full road structure and its whole life. Sustainability issues other than climate change will also be considered during the course of the project.
The current phase of asPECT covers the lifecycle stages 1 to 7 as detailed in Figure 1 above.