Following on the heals of last week’s update about Solar Roadways comes news of an organization called Greenroads that hopes to bring US Green Building Council-like standards to road construction. The USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification represents an industry-wide set of standards for green building. Greenroads aims to develop a list best practices in constructing sustainable roads.

According to an article from Discovery News, roads that meet these standards will provide a wealth of benefits. The aim of Greenroads is to

• Make roads quieter
• Do life cycle analyses and life cycle inventories for materials used in construction
• Reduce stormwater runoff, and treat what remains
• Allow for passage of fish and wildlife across roadways
• Make roads last longer
• Make roads cooler to mitigate urban heat island effects

According to their website, “Greenroads began in the University of Washington’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2007 . . . In mid-2007 the UW teamed up with CH2M HILL to fully develop the Greenroads rating system.”

Last week Greenroads released version 1.0 (PDF) of their rating system. Greenroads intends to serve as a “sustainability performance metric for roadway design and construction.” The metric applies to both new and existing roadways in need of reconstruction. Much like the LEED certification, the system determines a project’s sustainability measure on a sliding scale. “It awards credits for approved sustainable choices/practices and can be used to assess roadway project sustainability. This assessment can, if desired, include four different certification levels depending upon total points earned.”

Greenroads provides

(1) a holistic way of considering roadway sustainability
(2) a defined and quantitative means to assess roadway sustainability
(3) a tool for decision-makers, agencies, consultants and contractors that enables informed design and construction decisions regarding sustainability.

While the Solar Roadway may not be exactly what Green Roads envisions, the future of roads may look very different than today. By bringing a well-defined set of best practices and certification process to building green streets, road construction can enter the decade of sustainability.

- Eric Wilson

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