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Roads are lifelines. Like electrical wires that deliver light and heat and water pipes essential to supporting human habitats, streets convey people, goods, and vehicles for accessing food, family, health care, education, and employment.
But road construction also brings deforestation and loss of wildlife habitat and contributes significantly to climate change through earthmoving, soil sealing, heavy machinery use, building material consumption, and the perpetuation of car culture, all of which generate ample greenhouse gas emissions.
Transportation infrastructure can be a critical enabler of stability, resilience, development, and growth, so roads are especially vital—and, therefore, especially problematic—in developing countries like Colombia, which tend to be most at risk for negative effects from climate change.
According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in November 2024 in its Colombia Climate Change Country profile, “Though Colombia is not a major carbon emitter, the country’s productive sectors and unique ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. Vital components of Colombia’s economy, such as hydroelectricity production—which generates two-thirds of the country’s electricity—and agriculture, are both highly vulnerable to climate change. Meanwhile, climate variability, irregular rainfall, and prolonged droughts are disproportionately impacting the traditional ways of life of the country’s rural and ethnic communities.”
These risks Colombia faces have inspired its government to set ambitious climate goals like becoming carbon-neutral by 2050 and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50% by 2030—even as the country invests heavily in road construction, expansion, and improvement projects.
Colombian construction company Conconcreto is doing its part by designing more sustainable roads and bridges, buoyed by a growing commitment to circularity and a voracious appetite for digital transformation. “We deeply believe in sustainability,” says Tomás Trujillo, Conconcreto’s director of BIM integration. “We have to lower our emissions … humanity doesn’t have a choice.”
The vast majority of the world’s roads and bridges are made of concrete and steel. Both are major contributors to climate change. Concrete is the most widely used material in the world—second only to water, according to the World Economic Forum, which says global cement manufacturing produces approximately 6% of the world’s total CO2 emissions. Steel emits even more carbon. The world’s largest-emitting manufacturing sector, it’s responsible for 7% of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions, the World Economic Forum reports.
To reduce the impact of concrete and steel, Conconcreto is committed to using less of both. “We are significantly optimizing the road structure,” says Trujillo. The company does that by conducting real-life load tests on driven piles to obtain a more accurate bearing capacity to reduce the geotechnical uncertainty. This process helps prevent over-engineering so that projects use the minimum materials necessary to maintain structural integrity and safety. “Understanding the maximum capacity of the soil is one of the ways we can make better decisions and reduce the amount of concrete and steel we use.”
Because Colombia is prone to earthquakes, another sustainable building strategy Conconcreto uses on transportation infrastructure projects—bridges, in particular—is seismic isolation, which works by decoupling the structure from the ground so that when the earth moves during an earthquake, the structure stays relatively stationary.
“Seismic isolators are like a skating platform for the bridge,” says Trujillo, who notes that a bridge built on top of seismic isolators will sway during an earthquake instead of shake because the “skating platform” acts like a shock absorber. “When you have that kind of seismic activity, making the structures lighter is better. So, by implementing seismic isolation you can reduce the amount of concrete and steel.”
Using seismic protection systems is simultaneously safer and more sustainable. “An earthquake will move the soil. And when the soil moves, the structure will move. So, it all comes down to energy,” Trujillo says. “The less mass you have, the less energy is going to be put in motion.”
Conconcreto’s approach to transportation infrastructure is evident in Instituto de Desarrollo Urbano-IDU projects like Bogotá’s Nueva Calle 13 project. A USD $603 million reimagining of the city’s Calle 13 thoroughfare, the project—which the local government has divided into five sections, two of which Conconcreto is building—will transform the 13.2-mile (21.4-km) road into a corridor for public transit. Scheduled for completion by late 2026 or early 2027, the finished street will have 10 lanes, including one lane in each direction that’s exclusively for zero-emission public buses. The project also includes nearly 64 acres (26 Ha) of public space, 23 acres (9.3 Ha) of green areas, 1,819 new trees, and a bike path on each side of the road. This work also earned the company “Best Infrastructure Project” in Autodesk’s 2024 Design & Make Awards.
By using these strategies to reduce concrete and steel on the project, Conconcreto estimates it will eliminate more than 24.671 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year from Calle 13’s carbon footprint, which is the same amount of carbon that would be sequestered if the company had planted more than 24.746 acres of forest.
To generate the economic benefits that Colombia needs from them, projects like Calle 13 have to be as responsible socially as they are environmentally, says Trujillo. The project is expected to create more than 2,000 jobs for skilled and unskilled labor; per government stipulations, the latter must constitute 30% of the project’s workforce.
“It’s no secret that we are a developing country that’s dealing with poverty and inequality. This is a way the government can create opportunities for the unskilled workforce,” says Trujillo, adding that hiring unskilled workers and providing them with tech skills to build projects like Calle 13 is a way to activate the economy. “If you enter a job with zero knowledge and spend six months, 12 months, or 18 months working there, you are going to leave with new skills and an opportunity to earn a 40% or 50% higher income.”
Though artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming jobs in design and engineering, many construction jobs are stable and secure despite new technology. “I don’t think … you are going to replace unskilled workers with AI,” Trujillo says. “We still need people to carry materials and install them on the jobsite.”
In 2023 alone, IDU’s projects, with Conconcreto as general contractor, shortened commute times for Colombians by 33%, created 3,300 jobs, and eliminated 323 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. The company also reused and recycled 26% of construction waste—a number that is certain to increase as Conconcreto embraces the notion of circular construction.
“This year we had the challenge to go beyond the sustainability concept to understand circularity and how it works for our industry,” Trujillo explains. “We got to four main things we understand as circularity that will shape our decision-making to be more responsible to our planet with the purpose of relying less on new raw materials, they are: consuming less, consuming longer, consuming cleaner, and consuming again. “This contributes to reducing CO2 emissions, increasing circularity, and protecting biodiversity while generating efficiencies for the business.”
“Bogotá is facing a shortage of materials for all the infrastructure it’s building. So, circularity is beginning to look like the only way forward. Not the better way, nor the cheaper way, nor the compliant way. The only way,” Trujillo says. “If we are going to look for road filling materials that comply with the mechanical properties we need, we are not going to find them in Bogotá as new materials. So, we will have to go to other cities or far-away zones, and that will get really expensive. Instead, we need to start using materials that are already available on our projects—the existing pavement, concrete from the existing walkways, concrete from the surrounding buildings. We need to take all that material, crush it, and use it as filling material.”
In Colombia and around the world, designers need to embrace circularity just as urgently as builders are by conceiving structures with their end in mind. “For a century or two, we have been building thinking that buildings will stand forever. But they don’t,” Trujillo says. “You eventually have to tear buildings down, so you need to start thinking as early as possible about how you’re going to reuse all that material.”
As it pivots to a new, more circular way of designing and building, Conconcreto is relying more on digital technology to achieve its goals—including software such as Autodesk Construction Cloud, BIM Collaborate Pro, Civil 3D, Navisworks, and Revit, all of which have been vital on projects such as Nueva Calle 13.
Building information modeling (BIM) has been especially crucial, according to Trujillo. In dense urban environments such as Bogotá, building roads and bridges means navigating a multitude of subterranean utilities that provide critical services to citizens, including sewers, water mains, power lines, and telecommunications networks. By visualizing projects before breaking ground and easily sharing plans with stakeholders who might be impacted, BIM helps engineers and builders avoid clashes that can add unnecessary time, cost, and waste to projects.
“Projects conceived and executed with BIM methodology are much less delayed versus the ones with no BIM,” says Trujillo, who cites data from IDU showing that just 1–5% of projects with BIM encounter delays, compared to as many as 25% of projects without BIM. “It’s a huge difference.”
BIM doesn’t just make projects more efficient; it also makes them more transparent, which is particularly important for public projects that receive taxpayer funding. “In Colombia, these projects are under constant supervision by control agencies and the people in general,” Trujillo says. “BIM is a really good way to make projects clearer for all stakeholders: Where is the project? Where is the money going? How is the general contractor doing? You can use BIM to communicate what’s going on in the project. This will help more people be engaged with the project, which results in more transparency.”
The IDU says BIM adoption has been robust, with 92% of new infrastructure projects in Bogotá optimizing project processes and performance through BIM. That said, supporting partner contractors on their digital transformation journey comes with challenges. “Understanding that BIM goes beyond software or a database has been a pillar within the entity and outside of it,” says IDU’s Director of Urban Development, José Javier Suárez. “Resistance to change also implies understanding the difficulties of the traditional way of managing projects. For this reason, the IDU is working on training processes for the implementation of BIM and tools that allow its management.”
From a sustainability perspective, BIM’s most important byproduct is data. “The first step with sustainability and circularity is measuring, because that’s the only way for you to know that you are improving,” Trujillo says, adding that Conconcreto can aggregate BIM data from past projects to establish a baseline against which to measure savings of concrete, steel, and other materials. “Without BIM it’s going to be almost impossible to measure where you are and how you’re performing.”
BIM can deliver even greater impact at scale, according to Trujillo, who notes that as much as 80% of the data generated by the construction industry goes unused. “When you think about the retail industry, the financial industry, and the health care industry, they have been harnessing more and more data and conducting more and more analysis. We are not there yet,” he continues. “As an industry, we still lack a lot of structured data that we can analyze to make better decisions.”
Tomás Trujillo, director of BIM integration, Conconcreto
Eventually, AI will help by automating data collection and analysis. “BIM is an enabler, and AI will put BIM on the next level,” Trujillo says. In the meantime, AI can unlock increased sustainability and circularity by giving designers and engineers more bandwidth for ideating novel solutions to their biggest waste and emissions challenges. “The way we approach AI right now is: Don’t waste time recording meetings, taking notes, or writing emails. Let AI help you with those kinds of ‘office’ things so you can have more time to think about the project and how to optimize its design and constructability,” Trujillo says. “AI gives us more time to think about topics we don’t usually have time to think about so that we can be more critical about them.”
Colombia is advancing the adoption of smart city models through its National Policy for Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence. Suárez says that although there’s still a long way to go when it comes to tapping AI’s full potential, IDU is already working on improving productivity using big data and artificial intelligence integrated with BIM.
“The central objective is the efficiency and automation of design and construction processes,” says Suárez. “We are not far from achieving the synergy necessary to optimize time and cost by addressing repetitive tasks and integrating generative artificial intelligence, even reaching predictability analysis, such as the management of potential risks.”
In Colombia and around the world, that’s the promise of using technology to build transportation infrastructure. “Digital transformation is not a goal, per se. It’s the way to a more sustainable, more efficient, more productive construction sector,” Trujillo says. “Think about the health care sector, or the financial system. How are all these other industries thriving? If you take a look around and see, you’ll find that it’s because of technology. We have to keep believing in technology and finding new ways to use it.”
Matt Alderton is a Chicago-based freelance writer specializing in business, design, food, travel, and technology. A graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, his past subjects have included everything from Beanie Babies and mega bridges to robots and chicken sandwiches. He may be reached via his website, MattAlderton.com.
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