Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Transportation Research Part D journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/trd Considering infrastructure when calculating emissions for freight transportation Erik Fridell, Sebastian Bäckström, Håkan Stripple IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, Box 53021, SE 40014 Gothenburg, Sweden ABSTRACT In this paper, the contributions to emissions to air related to traffic infrastructure and terminals are analysed for freight transport with different modes. Data on emissions per km road or railway from existing LCA reports are adapted to a selection of road types and one type of railway line. The presented data are for air pollutants, use of primary energy and emissions of green-house gases divided into construction, maintenance and op- eration phases. These data are then allocated to the traffic-work produced on the infrastructure during its life span. Different allocation methods are suggested for the separate LCA-phases. The research has a focus on freight transport, why data are presented as emissions per vehicle-km for a number of truck and train types. For ports and airports, data are available per tonne of goods over quay or in- and outgoing. These results are then used to calculate the emissions added for infrastructure for freight transport chains. Examples are given showing the magnitude of emissions originating from infrastructure that can be added to tailpipe and other upstream emissions, e.g. fuel and vehicle production. In relation to tailpipe emissions the CO 2 emissions from infrastructure is typically 1–7% for road and around 17% for rail. For air and sea the results will vary significantly; for typical intra-Europe routes we find a contribution from infrastructure of about 3% for air and 21–34% for sea, in relation to emissions from the vessels. 1. Introduction The transport sector faces large challenges when it comes to reducing its environmental impact. While many other sectors show decreasing emissions of greenhouse gases, transportation is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. While passenger transportation is moving towards electrification and less CO 2 -intensive fuel alternatives, freight transportation mainly remains with fossil liquid fuels. Further, other emissions than greenhouse gases continue to cause large problems with air quality leading to health risks, eu- trophication, acidification, lower crop yields and other negative external effects. Large issues remain with emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides and particulate matter as well as with elevated ozone concentrations (Rodrigue, 2017). The transport sector in the EU (excluding international bunkers for air and sea) emitted about 931 Mtonne CO 2 -equivalents in 2016 which is about 23% of the total emissions. Of these the road sector contributed with 883 (95%) Mtonne and of this 232 (25%) Mtonne are from heavy duty vehicles (Eurostat, 2019). Freight transportation of goods therefore often constitutes a relatively large fraction of the environmental “foot print” of goods and there is thus a growing interest in calculating in detail the emissions and other impacts from transport systems and logistics services. In doing this, it is normal practice to calculate the traffic related tail pipe emissions of air pollutants and green-house gases and subsequently allocate it to the transported freight/cargo. Quite often, only emissions of CO 2 are considered in the assessment. This type of calculations presents the emissions per transport work (often expressed in g/tonne-km), which is translated to mass of emissions for the transport service. The total emission for a specific transport operation is then found by multiplying the emission per transport work with the freight mass and the distance. The assumption for this type of assessments is, although often not articulated, that the emissions from the operation of vehicles https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2019.02.013 E-mail address: erik.fridell@ivl.se (E. Fridell). Transportation Research Part D 69 (2019) 346–363 1361-9209/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T