Italy, Norway and the sustainable future of infrastructure

On May 4, an event focused on LCA for road and highway infrastructure was held in Rome at the Auditorium Donat Cattin.

The conference “Powerful automated, digital, and verified solutions for sustainable roads and highways”, the first international EPDItaly event, was sponsored by program operators EPDItaly, EPD Norway, and LCA.no, with the collaboration of ICMQ and the Norwegian Embassy in Italy and the sponsorship of AIS. The meeting, mainly dedicated to the sustainable development of Italian and Norwegian road and highway infrastructure, was attended by representatives of Italian institutions (Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport and Ministry of Environment and Energy Security) and national and international associations.
The spotlight was especially on the potential and prospects of the product certification system, which, thanks to EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) and LCA (Life Cycle Analysis), contributes to the achievement of sustainability goals set by the EU Commission.

Doing the honors was Lorenzo Orsenigo, ICMQ President, with Håkon Hauan, EPD Norway President. President Orsenigo first outlined the membership of ECO Platform and EPDItaly’s collaborative relationship with Norway and other Program Operators from European and non-European countries, and then dwelt on the need for standard methods of assessing sustainability and mutual recognition of certifications issued for products to travel around Europe.
With this in mind, Hauan recounted his country’s experience with sustainability, pointing out that the Norwegian authorities have set a benchmark for tons of CO2 emissions from asphalt production: having established a price for emissions, if an asphalt producer provides verified documentation that his asphalt has 30 kg of CO2 per emission, he is carbon neutral. If the same type of asphalt produced emits 25 kg of CO2 it is entitled to a premium, while with 35 kg of CO2 it pays a penalty. 
An extremely practical system that favors, during public tenders, those who emit the least CO2 and not those who bid the lowest. The results can be seen: Norway has already reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent and expects to reach 50 percent by 2030.

How to measure sustainability?
The big issue, then, is measuring sustainability reliably through the use of a standard tool for everyone. Interesting in this regard is the proposal of LCA.no, a Norwegian company for digital innovation in the environmental field, which has devised software that allows EPDs to be generated by optimizing the certification and validation process and then used to calculate the impacts of the work as a whole. Interesting then is the connection with the BIM model of the work. The tool was explained during the event by Trond Edvardsen, CEO of the Scandinavian IT company. The basic concept is simple: thanks to digitization, data entry and subsequent checks, updates and comparisons become easier and faster operations.

Pietro Baratono, representing the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, reiterated the importance of digitization within the New Procurement Code from design to implementation, from testing to management. Hoping that public contracting stations will soon be certified, Baratono stressed that all their top management must understand the strategic nature of digitization in order to achieve certain time and cost.

Stefano Susani, CEO Tecne – Autostrade per l’Italia Group, who was present as LCA coordinator for the Infrastructure Working Group of AIS – Sustainable Infrastructure Association, reaffirmed the centrality of the concept of the life cycle of the work: to make it truly sustainable and reduce its environmental impact, conscious choices are necessary. 
Thanks to the LCA study of a ‘work or part of it, it is possible to predict the effects of various design proposals and consequently choose the most suitable materials for construction. With this in mind, AIS has created a Working Group to identify and standardize analysis methods that are based on LCA; the Position paper on the topic will be ready by the third quarter of 2023.

Orsenigo looks to the future of EPDItaly with confidence: “The EPD is not a sustainability sticker,” says Orsenigo, “but a document between economic operators, a product identity card that lists the environmental impacts of the product. It is the most widely used tool in the world: in Europe alone in the construction sector there are 10 thousand certified products. Companies will increasingly invest in this tool.”