Cool Pavements can Mitigate Climate Change

Brief 

Cool pavements offer not only a more pleasant urban climate in the summer but can also have other benefits, according to Randolph Kirchain, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub. The light reflected into nearby buildings may reduce their energy demand for heating and cooling, and radiation reflected back into space can counter some radiation captured by greenhouse gases.

Insight

As cities search for climate change solutions, many have turned to one burgeoning technology: cool pavements. By reflecting a greater proportion of solar radiation, cool pavements can offer an array of climate change mitigation benefits, from direct radiative forcing to reduced building energy demand.

Yet, scientists from the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) have found that cool pavements are not just a summertime solution. Here, Randolph Kirchain, a principal research scientist at CSHub, discusses how implementing cool pavements can offer myriad greenhouse gas reductions in cities — some of which occur even in the winter.

Q: What exactly are cool pavements?

A: There are two ways to make a cool pavement: changing the pavement formulation to make the pavement porous like a sponge (a so-called “pervious pavement”), or paving with reflective materials.

The latter method has been applied extensively because it can be easily adopted on the current road network with different traffic volumes while sustaining — and sometimes improving — the road longevity. To the average observer, surface reflectivity usually corresponds to the color of a pavement — the lighter, the more reflective.

We can quantify this surface reflectivity through a measurement called albedo, which refers to the percentage of light a surface reflects. Typically, a reflective pavement has an albedo of 0.3 or higher, meaning that it reflects 30 percent of the light it receives.

To attain this reflectivity, there are a number of techniques at our disposal. The most common approach is to simply paint a brighter coating atop existing pavements. But it’s also possible to pave with materials that possess naturally greater reflectivity, such as concrete or lighter-colored binders and aggregates.