Eurobitume’s Anja Sörensen at CILA 2019 in Mexico
Although it is not European, this important event provided a valuable opportunity to share our European experiences and demonstrate our position as the voice of European bitumen industry to a wider geographic audience. With Spanish and Portugese the official languages of the congress, it provides a natural connection to the Iberian Peninsula and there is a tradition for some Eurobitume member companies to participate - with the aims of building industry relationships within the international bitumen community, supporting knowledge exchange and the sharing of best practices.
Anja’s presentation about the European perspective on current and future challenges for our industries began with an overview of Eurobitume, our vision, mission and the range of activities we undertake on behalf of members.
The three main topic areas Anja focused upon were:
- Health and Safety: health and safety are key for our industry and a number of European and local topics were raised, as well as what Eurobitume did to address them.
- Sustainability: this covered a variety of angles, from missing definitions and horizontal standards to which framework and goals individual countries set in Europe, the update of Eurobitume´s Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) and the work outlined by our Bitumen Sustainability Steering Group (BSSG).
- Developments standardisation, specifications and test methods: these were outlined on a European level, as well as local requirements, and how Eurobitume is sharing our members’ knowledge and expertise.
The presentation concluded with a brief promotion of the 2020 E&E Congress in Madrid, where all the topics Anja presented, as well as those addressed during the rest of CILA Mexico (#XXCILA), were covered.
The biannual CILA Congress attracted not only more than 800 attendees, but also a huge number of additional participants who ‘joined’ the event remotely by live streaming. In 2021, the Ibero-Latin American Asphalt community (CILA) will convene in Punta de Este, Uruguay.