Life cycle assessment: Assessing the environmental impact in the railway maintenance

Abstract

The railway sector plays an important role in the European transport sector and its environmental sustainability is a highly important issue today recognized by all the main stakeholders, including the European Commission. EU-28 railway transport network consisted of 220,000 km of railway lines in 2013. Such a big railway transport network requires maintenance. Maintenance of a railway infrastructure is a resource-and cost-demanding activity that has as well a considerable impact on the environment. This paper presents the results of the environmental assessment of an innovative new product which aims to decrease the environmental impact of the railway maintenance processes. Life cycle assessment methodology was used and results show that the biggest environmental impact, in all impact categories, is achieved in the use and maintenance phase. In the end, the normalized data of the environmental impact were presented using the standard functional unit for the freight trains: tonne for kilometre (tkm). Additionally, authors have compared two different functional units that could be used in Life cycle assessment of the self-propelled freight railway vehicles, proposing the use of the new functional unit: tonne for working hour (twh). Use of such customized functional unit is more appropriate because of the specific nature of work that selfpropelled bulk carriages have.