ROADWAYS AND INFRASTRUCTURE Environmental impacts of a highly congested section of the Pan-American highway in Peru using life cycle assessment Daniel Verán-Leigh 1 & Gustavo Larrea-Gallegos 1 & Ian Vázquez-Rowe 1 Received: 2 May 2018 /Accepted: 4 December 2018 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Purpose Road construction and transportation generate significant environmental impacts. Hence, it is increasingly important to understand the environmental burdens produced throughout the different stages of road development: construction, maintenance, traffic, and end-of-life. In this study, life cycle assessment (LCA) was used as an environmental management methodology to determine the impacts associated with a 22.4 km stretch of the South Pan-American (PS) highway in the province of Lima, Peru, one of the main access routes for traffic and goods entering Lima, located in a hyper-arid area parallel to the Pacific Ocean. Methods Life cycle modeling included the site-specific estimation of particulate matter emissions due to tire abrasion, brake lining, and road surface dust. In addition, different modeling options for combustion emissions for vehicles were considered. For this, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis were undertaken considering different emission standards and current vehicle fleet characteristics. The impact assessment stage included the calculation of climate change emissions, as well as air quality and abiotic depletion impact categories. Results and discussion Results demonstrate that environmental impacts are mainly attributable to traffic, representing in all impact categories assessed over 97% of burdens. The sensitivity analysis suggests that the use of secondary data from commonly used life cycle databases is a good proxy for the estimation of global warming potential impacts in the transport sector. However, for air quality categories, important variability was detected based on modeling assumptions. Conclusions This study intends to serve as a reference for the life cycle modeling of controlled access highways in developing countries, particularly in hyper-arid or desert areas. Keywords Highway . Industrial ecology . Infrastructure . LCA . Peru . Road construction 1 Introduction Road infrastructure and traffic have an important influence on society and on the environment. In fact, the interaction be- tween road infrastructure and the environment, due to its breadth and complexity, has been a recurrent subject of study in recent decades, since it directly affects the economic growth of a region through the connection of markets and the reduc- tion of transportation costs (Pachón and Ramírez 2006; Gallardo 2016). A study conducted by Laurance et al. (2014) pointed out that by 2050, an approximate of 25 million additional kilometers of roads and highways will be built in the world, a figure that depicts the importance of this sector on a global scale. Interestingly, the expansion of worldwide road networks will concentrate in many tropical areas of the world in which recent economic development, linked to an increased thirst for raw materials, is triggering this rapid growth (Laurance et al. 2009, 2014). Road transport and infrastructure implies, in the construc- tion phase, considerable interference with the environment, since it tends to be intensive in the use of resources (e.g., concrete, asphalt) (Birgisdóttir and Christensen 2005; Hakkinen and Mäkelä 1996), disruptive for local flora and fauna (Laurance et al. 2009, 2011), and, in the operation phase Responsible editor: Omer Tatari Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-018-1574-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Ian Vázquez-Rowe ian.vazquez@pucp.pe 1 Peruvian LCA Network, Department of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1801 Avenida Universitaria, San Miguel, 15088 Lima, Peru The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-018-1574-1