Victor Manuel Soltero

The construction sector is one of the leading global contributors to environmental footprint, with road infrastructures being a significant resource consumer. The traditional practice of using virgin raw materials and extracting natural aggregates has a significant impact, causing landscape alterations and disruptions to ecosystems. As result, the focus on achieving sustainable mobility through road networks is increasing. Companies operating in the civil sector must consider the environmental performance of roads to inform their decision making. Various assessment tools are available, with life cycle assessment being a commonly employed methodology in the industrial sector. However, its application to infrastructure projects has inherent challenges, primarily due to the complexity associated with inventory management. This complexity has resulted in a limited adoption of LCA within this sector. This research explores the suitability and compatibility of existing tools, methodologies, and databases, while establishing future requirements to adapt LCA and other types of environmental analysis to the life cycle of roads. To achieve this objective, a comprehensive analysis of the scientific and technical literature is conducted in this study. The findings highlight the need for more versatile impact analysis tools, including specialized databases tailored to the specifics of road infrastructure. Such enhancements would facilitate the application of procedures outlined in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards.

The management of the life cycle of the transport network is one of the main challenges of sustainable mobility. Roads and highways cause significant damage to the ecosystem. Specifically, lighting systems contribute to climate change, energy consumption, and human health effects. In this context, this work proposes the combination of life cycle assessment (LCA) with life cycle costing (LCC) to analyze the eco-efficiency of the life cycle of a road, including evaluation of the relative contribution of the lighting system to the total impact. Four scenarios were included in the model: (S1) high-pressure sodium lamps with ballast powered from the grid; (S2) halogen lamps powered from the grid; (S3) light-emitting diode lamps powered from the grid; and (S4) light-emitting diode lamps powered from a standalone photovoltaic system. The life cycle stages of raw material extraction, construction, use, maintenance, and end of road life were included in the analysis. The results show that scenarios S3 and S1 are the most eco-efficient relative to the less favorable S2 scenario (80% and 74% lower, respectively). Scenarios with the least environmental impact are the most economically viable.

Sustainable product design uses methodologies focused on eco-effectiveness and eco-efficiency for the proposal of innovative technological solutions and for the control of environmental impacts during the product life cycle. One of the main drawbacks of such techniques is their qualitative nature, associated with a decision-making process that is sometimes arbitrary, or with unverifiable data; this means that several complementary tools are currently being used to reduce the error in the results obtained. This situation makes the unification of procedures necessary. In this context, this research develops a methodology for the sustainable design of industrial products that integrates life cycle assessment (in its environmental, economic and social application) and cradle-to-cradle techniques. For this purpose, a new assessment process is proposed, based on damage, developing LCA+C2C endpoint indicators. The methodology is subsequently verified in a case study of products for sustainable mobility (city trike electric). The results show that an integrated LCA+C2C assessment can help to propose more balanced sustainable strategies and would be a suitable method to measure tradeoffs between economic, social and environmental results, for practical purposes and future redesigns. The unified method provides a procedure to design a solution with a trade-off between eco-efficient and eco-effective criteria; it also simplifies the design phases, facilitates the interpretation of the results and provides a quantitative scope to the cradle-to-cradle framework.

Biomass heating networks provide renewable heat using low carbon energy sources. They can be powerful tools for economy decarbonization. Heating networks can increase heating efficiency in districts and small size municipalities, using more efficient thermal generation technologies, with higher efficiencies and with more efficient emissions abatement technologies. This paper analyzes the application of a biomass fourth generation district heating, 4GDH (4th Generation Biomass District Heating), in a rural municipality. The heating network is designed to supply 77 residential buildings and eight public buildings, to replace the current individual diesel boilers and electrical heating systems. The development of the new fourth district heating generation implies the challenge of combining using low or very low temperatures in the distribution network pipes and delivery temperatures in existing facilities buildings. In this work biomass district heating designs based on third and fourth generation district heating network criteria are evaluated in terms of design conditions, operating ranges, effect of variable temperature operation, energy efficiency and investment and operating costs. The Internal Rate of Return of the different options ranges from 6.55% for a design based on the third generation network to 7.46% for a design based on the fourth generation network, with a 25 years investment horizon. The results and analyses of this work show the interest and challenges for the next low temperature DH generation for the rural area under analysis.

This paper presents a methodology for analyzing the regional potential for developing biomass district heating systems combining forestry biomass and agriculture residues as fuel. As a case study, this methodology is applied to the continental region of Spain. With this analysis the potential for the implementation of biomass district heating systems based on the use of agriculture residues is applied to 501 rural municipalities in Spain. The renewable forestry biomass and agriculture residues resources availability is analyzed and the biomass required for heating is assessed. The results of applying the methodology show the interest of the combination of biomass sources in a relevant number of municipalities with estimated Internal Rate of Return (IRR) values above 10% and for the analyzed region an IRR mean value of 4.3%.

In mild climate regions Directive 27/2012 EU application for developing sustainable district heating networks in consolidated urban nucleus is a challenge. In Spain most of the municipalities above 5,000 inhabitants have a reliable natural gas network and individual heating systems at homes. In this work a new heating network paradigm is proposed, the biomass universal heating network in rural areas. This model involves all the economic, legal and technical aspects and interactions between the different agents of the systems: provider company, individual and collective end-users and local and regional administration. The continental region in Spain has 588 municipalities with a population above 1,500 inhabitants close to forest biomass with renewable use. In many of these cases the regulation identifies the ownership of the forest resources use. The universal heating networks are a great opportunity for energy saving of 2,000 GWh, avoiding 2.7 million tons of CO2 emissions and with a global annual savings for end users of 61.8 million of euros. The presented model is easily extrapolated to other small municipalities in Europe. The real application of the model is presented for three municipalities in different locations of Spain where Universal Heating Networks are under development. The analysis show the interest of the integrated model for the three cases with different structural agents and relationships between them. The use of sustainable forest resources, extracted and managed by local companies, strengths circular economy in the region with a potential global economic impact above 200 M€.