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About Greenroads

Greenroads is a sustainability performance metric for roadway design and construction. It is applicable to new and reconstructed/rehabilitated roadways. It awards credits for approved sustainable choices/practices and can be used to assess roadway project sustainability. This assessment can, if desired, include four different certification levels depending upon total points earned.

A few key things that Greenroads provides:

1. A holistic way of considering roadway sustainability
2. A defined and quantitative means to assess roadway sustainability
3. A tool for decision-makers, agencies, consultants and contractors that enables informed design and construction decisions regarding sustainability.

How Greenroads Works

The Greenroads sustainability performance metric is a collection of sustainable roadway design/construction best practices. Each one describes a particular sustainable practice and assigns it a point value according to its impact on roadway sustainability. There are 11 "Project Requirements" that must be done in order for a roadway to be considered a Greenroad. There are also a number of "Voluntary Credits" that a project team can choose to pursue or not. The points associated with the Voluntary Credits that are achieved are added together to give a final Greenroads score. That score can then be used directly for sustainability tracking, internal information, publicity, etc.

Greenroads projects may choose to pursue several levels of "certification" based on the points associated with the Voluntary Credit achieved. The more points the higher the certification level. Currently, there are 4 certification levels: certified, silver, gold, and evergreen.

How To Use Greenroads

So why would you or anyone want to use Greenroads? We think there are a number of ways Greenroads can be useful. Here is our brief list:

• Defines basic roadway sustainability attributes. Essentially, it is a convenient list of what sustainability attributes a roadway can have. This can be useful to an owner or consultant seeking to design/construct a more sustainable roadway. Greenroads can serve as a list of ideas about what could be done. Not all credits are applicable to every roadway but no matter what you are designing/constructing you will find some good ideas here.
• Greater participation in roadway sustainability. The idea of this system is to present roadway sustainability in a straightforward manner so that everyone can understand and participate in roadway sustainability.
• Better evaluation of sustainability tradeoffs. Every roadway project involves tradeoffs. The difficult decision is when you must decide between two items that are not directly comparable. Greenroads assigns points to each credit based on its sustainability impact. Therefore, you can compare two different items using a common point system to determine their relative impact.
• Provide a means for sustainability assessment. If your organization has a goal of more sustainable roads then rating your projects with Greenroads can help you track how you are doing with respect to sustainability. If you can measure something then it becomes easier to assess, manage and improve.
• Confer market recognition for sustainability efforts. If a roadway is designed/constructed with sustainability in mind then it should be publicized. This helps increase awareness of sustainability efforts and gives recognition to those who participated in the effort.

Who Determines My Greenroads Rating

The official method: See "How to get your project rated".

The "on my own" method: If you do it this way you cannot use our logo nor can you claim you are certified. This method essentially means you figure all that stuff out on your own and don't bother to involve us.

We are okay with either route you take but remember, we've worked hard on this system and the logo and certification are associated with all that hard work - don't take them without doing what we ask.

Greenroads Developers

Greenroads is being jointly developed by the University of Washington and CH2M HILL. The system ahs been in development since early 2007 and has also involved a number of other people and organizations.