Posts Tagged ‘University of Washington’

Guardian News ran an article last week about “Greenroads,” opening with these daunting statistics:

With 4m miles of highway, the USA has around 10% of the entire planet’s paved roads – and spends $85bn (£52bn) annually on rolling out tens of thousands more miles. Building and maintaining a single mile of freeway takes as much energy as 200 US homes use in a year, consumes as much raw material as 1,000 households get through in 365 days and generates more waste than 1,200 homes produce annually.

Wow.

The good folks at the University of Washington have been focused on the greening of roads, and have announced the development of a rating system for road construction.

The “Greenroads Sustainability Performance Metric” works a lot like the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program, awarding credits for approved sustainable practices.     The metric already has a bit of support from states according to the Guardian article and the Greenroads website, which states that Greenroads “already has the support of five US state departments of transport.”  Greenroads is following a few projects as “case studies,” one of which was the I-90 West of George paving project in Washington.

Interesting metric system creating that is worth following, as it may one day change the way states and the federal government pave all their roads.

This article was originally posted on Wolfe Law Group’s topic-specific Northwest Green Building Law Blog.