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Transport is vital to modern life as we know it. Without roads and railways, we would be unable to distribute goods, travel or communicate as easily as we do. However, building road and railway networks comes at a cost.
The energy that goes into building a road or laying a railway track is huge, not to mention the use of unsustainable materials and the installation, maintenance and operating costs. On top of this, building roads and railways can lead to the release of harmful substances into the atmosphere, while most projects generate a substantial amount of waste.
The EU-funded SUP&R ITN project was set up to tackle this issue. The four-year research and training programme focused on tackling the environmental impacts of building roads and railways, reducing the energy required as well as the associated costs. In addition, it produced a bespoke sustainability assessment tool for product development for pavements and rail infrastructure.
“Introducing sustainability in transport infrastructure engineering means pushing towards a cultural change that, for the moment, considers the economical effectiveness as the only valuable criteria to design, build and manage infrastructures,” says project manager Davide Lo Presti of the University of Nottingham in the UK.
Recycling the roads
Six of the collaboration’s research projects involved developing new kinds of pavement technologies – working out how different kinds of recycled materials can be used to create pavements and road surfaces, and what methods should be used to incorporate them into a pavement mixture.
For example, researchers looked into how reclaimed asphalt taken from old road surfaces that have been dug up and replaced could be fully recycled. Currently, the recycling rate for reclaimed asphalt is 10-30 %. For the SUP&R ITN project, researchers defined techniques and technologies that could lead to more than 70 % of reclaimed asphalt being recycled and put back into the roads.
The main innovation in the project came in the form of a change in the way new researchers are taught. The group started a multidisciplinary doctoral training programme involving close collaboration between more than 20 research institutions and industrial stakeholders across Europe, including 16 research fellows.
By collaborating with stakeholders in the industry, the project aimed to directly impact the way huge construction projects are tackled from the outset, to reduce their environmental impact. By training people early in their academic careers, the project will continue to have an impact.
Outstanding professionals
“SUP&R ITN created outstanding professionals who, in a few months, have been recruited within the industry – academia and private sector – and are ambassadors of this cultural change. They will pass the main concepts acquired during the programme to peers, organisations and the next generation of professionals,” says Lo Presti.
This collaboration led industry stakeholders to develop some of the ideas introduced by the group. For example, a new bio-asphalt, investigated by the SUP&R ITN project, is now being trialled at full scale in another EU-funded project.
Two academics who worked on the project are now employed by private companies which took an interest in the outcomes of the SUP&R ITN research. For those who were more senior in the project, collaboration remains a key part of their ongoing work.
SUP&R ITN involved 29 institutions from across Europe and the USA, and its results will be made available online. “Today, the group of SUP&R ITN is still alive and both supervisors and fellows collaborate within other projects and are still working together towards achieving the objectives of the programme and taking the scientific results to the next step,” says Lo Presti.