A methodology to implement sustainability in road pavement engineering is offered by the circular economy main principle of replacing the conventional linear model for product design and consumption with a circular one "based on sharing, leasing, reuse, repair, refurbishment and recycling, in an (almost) closed loop, where products and the materials they contain are highly valued". In this sense, the road pavement sector offers a great opportunity, in fact the asphalt material is generally considered 100% reusable, however, despite several efforts towards the use of total asphalt recycling have been made over the past 30 years, a massive constraint still exists: the dependance on using fossil fuel-based materials as binders, recycling agents and engineered polymers. It’s within this context that part of this consortium (UNIPA, EIFFAGE) have participated in the firstof-its-kind project “BioRePavation 2015 - 2018” (
http://biorepavation.ifsttar.fr(opens in new window)) aiming at investigating the feasibility of using bio-materials, used along with asphalt pavement recycling, to reduce the use of virgin aggregates and petroleum bitumen for road pavements. BioRePavation showed that bio-asphalt mixtures can have even superior performances to conventional asphalt mixtures, however they still include products derived from oil and are two times more expensive. These limitations can be overcome with REcircularPAV, a training-through-research project aiming at engineering cost-effective circular asphalt mixtures for road pavement in a fossil fuel-free society, incorporating very high-content of reclaimed asphalt together with end-of-life tyres and bio-based materials. The technology will be investigated at laboratory level and upscaled to assess operational issues during plant manufacturing and laying processes. Once the mixtures are engineered, predicted performances will be assessed in terms of mechanical properties, aging behavior and environmental and economical impact.
