The Environmental Impact Of The Urban Tram Based On Life Cycle Assessment Theory

Under the quickening pace of the economy, the civilization of the human being has been developed into a highest degree. The traditional means of transportation cannot satisfy the demand of urban traffic. Therefore, an increasing means of transportation, such as Urban Tram, Light Rail, Subway and Bus Rapid Transit, have been brought into life. For those newest means of transport, the most common way for evaluation is to study its traffic features instead of environment features. Even though, there indeed exists some researches about the environmental effect of means of transport. Most of them are focusing on the noise problem or the environment impact during its construction. This paper, aiming at providing determining basis for the authority in the realm of environment, studied the environment impact of the Urban Tram in its preparation, infrastructure, construction, vehicle manufacturing, operation, maintanance and end-of-life phases.According to previous analysis, the possible conclusions have been drawn in the following. (1) From the perspective of all life cycle phases, the vehicle-manufacturing phase produce the most amount of carbon dioxide, which make its contirubition global warming potential reaching 81%. Besides, owing to the structure of electricity mix in China, the operation phase consumes the most amounts of sulfur dioxide, fossil fuel and water, which may lead to acidification and resource depletion. (2) In infrastructure construction phase, the pavement engineering consumes more energy than rail engineering, while produce less pollutant. This is because the pavement owns the most quantity of work, but its pollutant production is not over-shadow the track. (3) In pavement engineering, the construction of the base course wins the chaimpion in both energy consumption and pollutant production. Besides, the value of RI is related to the production of gravel and cement, while the value of POCP, GWP are related to the production of the binder. (4) After normalizion, the most influential factor of the urban tram is the GWP, which accounts for 98.99%.