On Thursday, October 20th, at the San Rocco Sud service area near Rondissone (TO), a press conference was held to present “the Motorway of Tomorrow” organized by ASTM and Iterchimica. The event was held on the occasion of the repaving of the first 2 km of the A4 Turin-Milan motorway.
The overall work will involve the repaving of slow lane in both directions for a total of 250 km. The repaving work will make the A4 the first motorway in Europe to use Gipave, the green, hi-tech technology that combines graphene and specially selected recycled hard plastics, and 70% of reclaimed asphalt. This combination ensures greater performance in terms of sustainability and durability, increasing the pavement service life by up to 75%.
Compared to a maintenance carried out with traditional technologies, this solution will allow significant environmental savings: in fact, it will reduce energy consumption by about 90 million kW/h (-30%), equal to the annual needs of about 30,000 households, and will allow the abatement of 18.350.000 kg of CO2eq emissions (38.5% less), equal to the absorption of about 115,000 trees, saving almost 23 million kg of bitumen and about 480 million kg of raw materials (-40%). In addition, thanks to Gipave, about 1.5 million kg of hard plastics (equal to the weight of more than 1,200 cars) will be reused.
This activity is part of the ASTM Group’s wider “Smart Roads” project. The Turin-Milan section, which connects the two main economic and industrial hubs in the northwest of the country, was chosen by the Group to represent not only symbolically, but also de facto, the ASTM vision of the Motorway of the Future.
“After 6 years of research and development and numerous tests that have demonstrated both the technical and environmental performance of this technology, we are extremely proud to contribute together with the ASTM Group to the resurfacing of the A4 Turin-Milan motorway, which will thus become the first hi-tech, safe and sustainable motorway in Europe,” – commented Federica Giannattasio, CEO Iterchimica.
A work team formed by ASTM, Iterchimica, Itinera and SINA (these latter part of the Gavio Group) took part in the construction of this important infrastructure. The company Bitux provided the mixtures for the pilot project, while the sustainability study was carried out by the University of Bologna.
