Sustainable Geotechnical Solutions for Next-Generation Transportation Systems

The rapid expansion and upgrading of transportation infrastructure, particularly roads, railways, and airport runways, are placing unprecedented pressure on finite natural resources used in geotechnical construction. Conventional reliance on high-quality natural aggregates is increasingly unsustainable due to resource depletion, rising costs, and growing environmental constraints. At the same time, large volumes of waste materials, including discarded rubber tyres, plastics, mining rejects, waste glass, and demolished construction materials, continue to be stockpiled worldwide, posing significant environmental and societal challenges. Sustainable geotechnical solutions that promote the beneficial reuse of recycled and marginal materials offer a critical pathway to address these dual challenges. Recent advances in life-cycle assessment, big data analytics, and emerging techniques such as machine learning and artificial intelligence provide powerful tools to optimise material selection, predict long-term performance, and support evidence-based design of next-generation transportation systems with reduced environmental footprints and enhanced resilience.The primary goal is to advance scientific understanding and practical implementation of sustainable geotechnical solutions through the integration of recycled and waste-derived materials with robust experimental, analytical, and numerical frameworks. Recent advances in constitutive modelling, numerical modeling, large-scale physical modeling, field trial, life-cycle assessment, and data-driven approaches including machine learning and artificial intelligence, offer transformative opportunities to predict material behaviour, optimise mix designs, and quantify environmental and economic benefits across the infrastructure life cycle. By fostering interdisciplinary research and case studies, this Topic seeks to accelerate the transition from conventional resource-intensive practices to resilient, low-carbon, and circular geotechnical solutions for roads, railways, and airport infrastructures.This special issue welcomes all the relevant research and case studies on transportation infrastructures within, but not limited to the following specific themes:• Application of recycled/marginal materials in transportation infrastructures• Large-scale laboratory testing• Waste materials optimisation• Field test validation on waste material applications• Life cycle assessment on the use of recycled materials• Machine learning/artificial intelligence• Constitutive modeling to predict the geotechnical behaviour of waste materials• Numerical analysis to capture the performance of waste material inclusions• Energy-based analysis using recycled rubber• Dynamic loading behaviour of waste inclusions for roads/railways• Use of geosynthetics in transportation infrastructure systems Topic editors: Yujie Qi, Fernanda Bessa Ferreira, Yewei Zheng Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78298/sustainable-geotechnical-solutions-for-next-generation-transportation-systems