Post by ORIS Materials Intelligence

This week, we had Davide Lo Presti talk with us about pavement LCA, rubberised asphalt, wake-up calls, teaching the next generation, and tipping points in sustainable infrastructure. Who is Davide, you ask? Davide Lo Presti is Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Palermo, where he leads the SMARTiLab (Sustainable, Multifunctional, Automated and Resilient Transport Infrastructure) and is part of the Centre of Sustainability and Ecological Transition. His research focuses on sustainable pavement materials, reclaimed asphalt, alternative binders, and Life Cycle Assessment methodology for transport infrastructure. Lo Presti began his research career at the University of Nottingham, where his doctoral and post-doctoral work on crumb rubber asphalt became one of the most-downloaded papers in Construction and Building Materials for nearly a decade. Over twenty years, he has led and contributed to multiple European research programmes, including Re-Road, Back to Pave, Pavement LCM, SMARTI, and SURPAVE, an international master's programme on sustainable and resilient pavement engineering supported by the European Commission. He is one of the forces behind ROADLCA2026 Palermo, the International Symposium on Pavement and Bridge Life Cycle Assessment, which he is hosting in Palermo in October 2026. As always, you can listen to the episode on Youtube, Spotify and other platforms, the links are in the comments. We leave you with the finishing words of the interview: Renaud: What would make you say 'sustainable infrastructure has reached the tipping point, it is now mainstream'? Davide: I do not know whether I am going to see it. But what is really important to me is to be on the path. To see students who come at the beginning of their journey, and finish talking with the language and the ideas and the intuition driven by this learning process. They start to have ideas. They start to consider things. That is the biggest reward. Maybe things will not happen immediately, but if you start to see people thinking in a certain way, then it will become natural. Whatever people do, it will be expressed in how we live, in our society. That is my tipping point.