Recycled Materials and By-Products for Pavement Construction

Dear Colleagues,

The volume of waste is increasing rapidly due to multiple human activities, while the growing demand for raw materials to construct and maintain infrastructures is putting at stake the global availability of natural resources. It seems straightforward to use recycled materials and by-products as a replacement of non-renewable resources in construction activities as a means to reduce the pressure on the natural environment as well as to mitigate the need of landfilling. Recycling waste materials in the construction and maintenance of infrastructures can lead to important environmental, social and economic benefits. This context opens the way to explore alternative solutions to enhance the efficiency and sustainability in road pavement construction, maintenance and demolition. This Special Issue intends to promote groundbreaking interdisciplinary discussions and research efforts that:

• Contribute to define sustainable (environmental, social and economic) and efficient strategies for infrastructure construction, maintenance and demolition, and materials recycling
• Contribute to reduce the environmental, economic and social burdens in transportation systems by introducing and or/optimizing the design of innovative materials and processes for recycling and reuse of materials
• Contribute to define recommendations, protocols and guidelines for common strategies intended to maximize the recycling rates, improve the reliability and reproducibility of alternative solutions

Anchored in those points, suggested topics for this Special Issue include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• Use of recycled materials and by-products in road pavement layers
• Sustainability assessment of road pavement materials and technologies for infrastructure projects
• Recent developments in the life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC) and social life cycle assessment (SLCA) methodologies applied to transport infrastructure
• Improvement of the quality of existing datasets or development of new ones
• Green materials for road pavement design
• Development of pavement performance prediction models for road pavements that incorporate recycled materials or by-products in their layers
• Reliability, reproducibility and repeatability of recycled materials and processes
• Laboratory and full-scale testing and modelling
• Reduction of the pollution and waste generated by road pavement construction, maintenance and rehabilitation as well as the energy and raw materials consumed
• Optimization of road pavement maintenance and rehabilitation
• Development of advanced computational techniques and algorithms applied to road pavement design, construction, maintenance and rehabilitation, and demolition