With the Sustainability on the go project, the Italian Infrastructure Manager RFI launched a governance and change management program to accelerate the development and integration of sustainability methodologies and good practices in all company processes, also involving the entire supply chain and other stakeholders.
To this end, RFI has identified 10 Lines of Action with Strategic Value; one of these concerns the design of more sustainable infrastructures and aims to update the technical standards to implement the sustainability principles in the design, construction, use and decommissioning phases of railway infrastructures.
In this article the sustainability-oriented update of the General Technical Specifications for Civil Works Procurement by RFI is illustrated and, in particular, the section concerning “Concrete and steel works” is addressed. The article outlines the provisions adopted regarding the sustainability assessment of concrete and steel structures in terms of carbon footprint reduction, that can be demonstrated through an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) or other sustainability certifications. The request for the abovementioned certification, in addition to raising awareness among the entire audience of stakeholders, will be useful to have an account of the real values of emissions in terms of Global Warming Potential (GWP).
The article also provides an overview of the status of EPDs for cement, concrete and steel in Italy, along with their average GWP values. This analysis, carried out in collaboration with the University of Brescia, offers a detailed picture of the environmental implications associated with these materials.
Finally, the article presents a proposal for defining sustainability classes for concrete in Italy in terms of GWP and compares them with other classifications adopted in Europe, highlighting some variability in the policies adopted by different countries.