The tenth anniversary of the Symposiom on Circular Economy and Urban Mining (SUM conference) was held at the Municipal Congress Centre of Capri, Italy in May 2022. This conference covered a wide range of topics; from technologies which have been implemented to improve the circularity of a sector, to a discussion of policies and legal aspects which should be adopted to move a region or a country towards a more circular economy.

In total there were over 190 presentations given by over 200 professors, researchers, engineering professionals, policy makers and students attended the event. This was, therefore, a prime opportunity to disseminate the goals and objectives of the RE-MED project. Four members of the RE-MED project were present from 18th to 20 May 2022: Drs. Acuto, Dunn, Mantalovas from University of Palermo (UNIPA, Italian partner) and Ms. Jaoude from the American University of Beirut (AUB, lebanease partner). Having many researchers there,  was a great opportunity to network and discuss, in more detail, the work being conducted by all of RE-MED’s partners.

The presentation, given by Dr. Dunn, was titled “State of Practice in the C&Dw Sector while Pursuing Circular Economy: The Italian Recycled Materials Market in Road Engineering” and was authored by Dr. Konstantinos Mantalovas, Dr. Iain Peter Dunn, Dr. Francesco Acuto (UNIPA, italian partner), Mrs. Boushra Barakat, Ms. Antoinette Abou Jaoude (AUB, lebanease partner), Dr. Oumaya Yazoghli Marzouk (Cerema, lead beneficiary, France), Prof.  Isaam Srour (AUB), and Prof. Gaetano Di Mino (UNIPA). The main thrust of the presentation was the unreliability of information regarding the recycling rate and use of construction and demolition waste (C&Dw) and how this unreliable data represents a barrier to the pursuit of a more circular economy. Within the auditorium there was a general agreement that the currently available data is overly optimistic and that, until the data can not be reliable, there can not be significant increase in the adoption of aggregates derived from C&Dw in the pavement sector.