Circular economy and reuse of excavated materials from TBM excavations

The management of excavated materials is one of the major issues for tunnelling projects from environmental, logistical, administrative and economical point of views. Despite the extreme importance of the topic and the huge volumes of materials produced in the context of major works, the excavated materials are too often considered as a waste and therefore their reuse is not a widely established practice. Webuild and GEEG have launched a research activity aimed at developing an integrated management system for excavated soils that involved numerous real tunnelling projects in Italy and abroad and a relevant number of different reuse modality, from the most common, as the morphological re-profiling, up to innovative uses with high added value. This paper, after a general introduction to the topic, intends to provide an overall description of the WE CYCLE Project and an update of the experimental evidences collected on the applicability of several methods of reuse of different soil typologies.