On 6th July, Ancona will hold the convention promoted by the European project REFIBRE-LIFE in collaboration also with the project LIFE NEREIDE. Their shared objective: to create extremely long-lasting, performing and silent asphalts, with the use of recycled materials such as rubber and textile fibre from End-of-Life Tyres and asphalt millings.

Good Practices for the use of recycled materials in road and civil sectors: the project REFIBRE-LIFE

On 6^th July, Ancona will hold the convention promoted by the European project REFIBRE-LIFE in collaboration also with the project LIFE NEREIDE. Their shared objective: to create extremely long-lasting, performing and silent asphalts, with the use of recycled materials such as rubber and textile fibre from End-of-Life Tyres and asphalt millings.

5^th June 2017 – To reuse textile fibre from End-of-Life Tyres at industrial level. The European research project “Refibre – LIFE” was born with this goal. It intends expanding the reuse of textile fibres deriving from ELT recovery for the production of reinforced asphalts and elastic compounds at industrial level.

On 6^th July Ancona will host the meeting “Good practices for the use of recycled materials, implications and policies. Example of application in roads and civil sector”. The congress is promoted by the project Life Refibre in collaboration with the Polytechnic University of Marche and Legambiente Marche in collaboration with Fabbioni&Partner and the Project Life Nereide.

The two projects financed by the European Community through the programme LIFE share the same objectives. Both projects aim at obtaining road surfaces with improved performances compared with traditional bitumen by using materials recycled from End-of-Life Tyres. The Project Refibre wants to reach its goals thanks to the use of reinforcing textile recovered from ELTs in base bitumen conglomerate (binder) to make the road surface more resistant to fatigue. This allows to noticeably prolong the average life of the pavement. The Project Nereide, instead, aims at developing low-noise road surfaces thanks to the use of rubber powder from ELTs and asphalt millings. During his speech, Professor Gaetano Licitra of ARPAT, will show the aims of the project NEREiDE and the possible synergies between the two LIFE projects.

The meeting will specifically discuss the aspects linked to policies; i.e.: how scientific evidence and the projects carried out in several contexts may have an influence and modify the policies, and the rules and regulations of reference to favour more virtuous behaviour. In this contest, the policies of the Green Public Procurement (GPP) have a key role. GPPs are the Public Administration’s “green purchases”. They may constitute a real driving force for the use of materials recovered from ELTs in the Public Sector. A large-scale extension of the technologies at the heart of the two LIFE projects would allow to have road surfaces with improved characteristics (lower noise emissions, greater duration, optimised performances and reduction of energy consumption thanks to lower temperatures for laying the asphalt). At the same time, they would be a valid application field for recycled rubber powder and mainly for the reinforcing fabric of the tyre, which are currently destined to landfill or energy recovery.