Sustainable Pavement Engineering
We Need Pavements
Rajib B. Mallick, Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Massachusetts, USA, And A. Veeraragavan, Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M), ChennaiThe need for safe, durable and smooth riding pavements on highways and in airports cannot be contended. Construction and maintenance of pavements cost money - which is mostly provided through taxes that are collected from the citizens. The money is spent on employing workers, quarrying and manufacturing usable products, transporting them, and laying down and compacting the materials. In this whole process, which gets repeated to different extents during the maintenance and rehabilitation cycles, man-made material is laid down to cover virgin (most likely arable) ground (making it un-arable from that point onwards), a significant amount of natural resources is utilized, (non renewable) energy is consumed, landfills are created, and different types of chemicals (in the form of gases) are emitted to the environment (all of these processes are irreversible). Thus, pavement engineering is a destructive and high impact activity. But remember the first sentence of this paragraph - and herein lies the dichotomy of modern civilization - you build something that you need but in the process you affect the earth in an irreversible harmful way. So what is the solution?
