Environmental sustainability of engineering works: geological and geotechnical aspects

The design and construction of engineering works such as road infrastructures, port facilities and waste disposal plants require that important environmental issues be addressed, in order to guarantee sustainability and facilitate acceptability by the population. With these objectives, much of the scientific work produced by the geological and geotechnical research group of the Università Politecnica delle Marche in the past 50 years has involved aspects such as understanding the effects of human activities on the environment in order to prevent or minimize the risks of permanent damage, exploration of solutions that optimize the use of natural resources, implementation of technologies that promote the use of improved natural materials for construction, application of design procedures that are based on high quality geological, geotechnical and geo-environmental models of the construction sites. This paper will present, via the illustration of some practical examples, the contribution that such research activities have provided on the solution of some important engineering problems in the past decades.