Game-changing solutions from LafargeHolcim

Company presenting advanced integrated road services at this week’s Abu Dhabi World Road Congress

LAFARGEHOLCIM will be presenting their advanced integrated road offer at this week’s World Road Congress in Abu Dhabi, with a focus on ORIS, a new digital service that helps to optimize road design through smarter use of locally sourced natural resources and materials.

Using this new service can make road infrastructure 50% less CO2 intensive while improving costs significantly. Beyond innovative pavement solutions, road structures, special binders or construction material services, LafargeHolcim will also introduce COPave, a carbon calculator dedicated to roads that can accurately forecast any project impact in its actual environment.

The World Road Congress, which is taking place from 6–10 October, is organized every four years and brings together government authorities, road and transport administrations and organizations, academics, as well as solutions providers.

Nicolas Miravalls, head of roads, said: ‘The road infrastructure market accounts for more than CHF550 billion worldwide. LafargeHolcim’s game-changing digital solutions are further strengthening our integrated road offer and will become key drivers for our infrastructure business.

The optimization of road designs and material use are significant enablers to improve sustainability in road infrastructure. The choice of road design, and material sourcing have massive impacts on costs, carbon footprint, durability and safety. That is why developing intelligent and integrated road solutions is a priority for LafargeHolcim.’

Some 700,000km of roads are built every year around the world, making road transportation a major source of carbon emissions worldwide and representing around 18% of global emissions. Because each road is unique, it is a complex challenge to define the most sustainable and cost-effective solutions adapted to the local resources environment.

With ORIS and COPave, LafargeHolcim say they are now launching two specific services at the World Road Congress that have the potential to significantly improve the way roads are built today.

ORIS is the world’s first digital material platform. Based on LafargeHolcim’s global knowledge of construction materials and powered by artificial intelligence and a digital platform, ORIS helps assess road designs at a very early stage with a holistic view including both the construction and maintenance phases of road projects.

Thanks to a powerful algorithm, ORIS supports road investors, owners and designers in properly estimating their project impacts, analyzing local natural resources, optimizing construction budgets, increasing sustainability and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Initial tests show that when using ORIS, costs for road projects can be reduced by up to 30% while cutting their carbon footprint by up to half. At the same time, the durability of these projects using ORIS can be increased threefold.

The second service to be presented in Abu Dhabi is COPave, a life-cycle assessment (LCA) software specifically dedicated to roads. Developed within two years at the company’s global Innovation Center in Lyon, France, it will allow road contractors to evaluate precisely the environmental footprint of their roads and enable them to be made as carbon efficient as possible.

COPave covers data from five continents and is a collaborative integrated service that can be used for new road projects but also maintenance programmes. The COPave service has been assessed and recommended by the BRE (Building Research Establishment) in the UK for the quality of its analysis.

LafargeHolcim, who are involved in several road projects in more than 40 countries worldwide, have contributed to important road infrastructure over the past years, such as the Edmonton Ring Road in Canada, the Sokna motorway in Egypt and the S5 expressway in Poland, and are currently delivering a major paving project on the A14 near Cambridge, in the UK.