National Concrete Pavement Technology Center

About the research

With increasing pressure to achieve carbon neutrality, the concrete pavement community of owners, builders, and suppliers is facing accelerating changes in the way they do business. Practitioners must balance the need to maintain or improve pavement performance and societal benefits while reducing environmental impacts. The ability to make decisions based on both the initial carbon footprint and the full life of a pavement—from cradle to recycling—is becoming crucial. These changes, coupled with turnover in staffing at agencies and in the construction industry, are creating a growing need for resources for decision-makers, office staff, and field personnel. Shifts in the labor force are also driving demands to achieve more in less time, meaning that resources provided to them must be packaged in a way that is readily accessible, often in the form of small bites of information rather than in large volumes. The incoming generation also tends to prefer gathering information from videos and other digital sources rather than printed formats, requiring a new approach for presenting the available information and resources. On the other hand, there is a wealth of fundamental information already available, including products produced under previous cooperative agreements, that should not be lost.

In response to this opportunity, the Center has assembled an outstanding national technical team with diverse expertise and experience that has both worked together on prior projects and demonstrated success with providing practical products to help build better concrete pavements. The team, representing leading academics and practitioners from 9 universities and 13 consulting firms from across the country, has developed a variety of useful technology transfer products for concrete pavement practitioners, including specifications, guidance documents, training products, and webinars, which have earned respect from many public highway agencies.

Together they will work to identify pressing needs related to the implementation of innovative technologies, including strategies for reducing carbon emissions, throughout the life of the contract.