The carbon footprint includes emissions over the life cycle of the product, operation, or solution (i.e., including the construction solution). A comparison of carbon footprint calculated for all possible alternative solutions can help to select the most “sustainable” option. Embodied carbon (EC) is an indicator of cumulative carbon emissions used in the solution adopted. Many researchers have reported that geogrids in pavements enhance the life span of pavements or alternatively consume less quantity of material in their construction for the same design life and thus often provide a cost-efficient alternative to traditional construction techniques. The sustainability of pavements may be evaluated by quantifying the EC of pavement structure within the considered life cycle boundary. In this paper, carbon emissions of unreinforced and geogrid-reinforced pavements designed were evaluated by quantifying EC for various cases. EC values of pavements decrease with the increase in the subgrade strength. The total EC value of unreinforced pavement structure were higher (231–368 tCO2e/km) in comparision with that of geogrid-reinforced pavement (161–342 tCO2e/km) for the given traffic, subgrade CBR, and LCR considered in the study. For the parameters considered in the analysis, the reduction in EC of geogrid-reinforced pavements compared with unreinforced pavements ranged from 7 to 24%. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.