Highly sustainable and long-lasting flexible pavements based on innovative bituminous mixtures

Strong impulse towards the sustainable transition and the Green Economy is recently affecting all research fields, including road pavement materials sector. To achieve the climate objectives, a renewed approach needs to be implemented to construct increasingly durable pavements, favouring the circularity of resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions (CO2e). To this purpose, the Authors have studied some bituminous mixtures (traditional and graphene based structurally modified ones), finalized to road and airport applications, in order to optimize mechanical performances, life span, energy consumption, component recycling. In special way, the graphene-based modified bituminous mixtures showed high mechanical performance, low rutting and high fatigue resistance, suggesting extensive applications in motorways as well as airport pavements. The paper describes some case studies referred to Italian applications.