On October 30th 2014, César Bartolomé of ECOLABEL project partner IECA held a telephone conference with the Inter-American Cement Federation (FICEM) on the ECOLABEL project. Private companies, national associations and technical institutes for the promotion of cement solutions are part of FICEM, which has currently has a technical committee of pavements. The telecpnference participants came from UNICON (Peru), ARGOS (Colombia), FIHP (Latin America), ASOCRETO (Colombia), CEMEX (Latin America), INECYC (Ecuador), CEMPRO (Guatemala), IBCH (Bolivia), ICPA (Argentina), DINO (Peru) and ICCG (Guatemala). When informed about the development of the ECOLABEL project, they decided to hold a teleconference to know more about it and potential application in Latinamerica.

César Bartolomé presented the project, its aims and current development, explaining that the assessment of roads will be undertaken considering environmental, technical, economic and social aspects. He also exposed that the assessment will be done according a LCA perspective and that at the end of the project, it is expected to write down a pre-standardisation document that permits the certification of road projects.

Attendees were very interested in the project. They commented that new methodologies were being developed in different countries but mainly focused on carbon footprint without taking into account other aspects, so ECOLABEL is of great interest for them. They want to be periodically informed about the development of the project and the results achieved, since they want to study the possibility of implementing the methodology in their countries, of course after adapting it to their own reality. For more information, contact cbartolome@ieca.es.