Método para evaluar el impacto del ruido del transporte rodado en el marco del análisis del ciclo de vida

Abstract

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