A METHOD TO ASSESS THE IMPACT OF ROAD TRANSPORT NOISE WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a widely used tool for assessing the environmental impacts of a product or service throughout its life cycle. This includes transportation, which causes various environmental problems such as noise. Noise has special characteristics (dependence on local factors, lack of linear additivity of emissions, etc.) which complicate the assessment of its impact. The lack of data on noise has been an additional problem. However, the recent publication of the strategic noise maps offers the opportunity to overcome these limitations. This paper provides a method to assess the impact of noise from road transport and integrate it into the LCA. This method overcomes the methodological limitations of previous studies and uses data from the noise maps to perform the assessments. The health impacts due to noise are quantified in DALYs (disability-adjusted life years), thus allowing the comparison and aggregation of noise with other pollutants harmful to health. The paper includes a case study where the proposed method is used to calculate the noise impact caused by a heavy vehicle that travels one kilometre on three different roads. The noise impact is compared with the health impacts due to fuel consumption and air emissions from the heavy vehicle. Through the case study, the need for specific noise impact assessments for each particular case is justified, while the validity of the proposed method to perform such assessments in an effective way is demonstrated. The results also show that noise has significant relevance in comparison to other impact categories typically assessed in LCA, which justifies its inclusion as a usual impact category.