Abstract for:Opportunities for reuse of parts and materials of bridges: a practical application of circularity concepts in asset management

Material flow is a part of various processes and is an essential part of asset management. Bridges management and the processes associated with it represents one of the opportunities where circularity concepts are quite interesting and worth investigating. Every bridge has a certain lifetime, and the times when it requires renovation or replacement act as an opportunity to decide what type of material will be used for the new project, and will happen with the material released from the current bridge. The ambition of an actor managing an asset (i.e. a bridge) is to reuse as much material as possible, reducing the environmental burden caused by the extraction of new materials and their processing. However, re-use of parts and materials isn’t as straightforward and one would hope. There are various factors that determine the degree of reuse and its impact on the key KPI’s like cost-effectiveness, environmental impact, long-term profitability and so on. The model attempts to explore these questions.