The construction sites of the new Lyon-Turin railway as a laboratory for developing new practices and rethinking sustainability within the context of large-scale works projects. This is the objective behind the meeting held on the morning of 30 July in Paris between the bi-national promoter TELT and the major international companies that are building the Mont Cenis base tunnel, marking the launch of the first Lyon-Turin Engagement Forum.
The commitments and planned actions on the construction sites are collected in the paper entitled “Commitment to the construction sites of the Lyon-Turin railway line“, presented during the first meeting of the Forum. The setting was not by chance that of Casa Italia, in the context of the Paris 2024 Olympics, which are dedicated precisely to the theme of sustainability.
The commitments made by the companies in the Integrity and Sustainability Pact signed when the contracts were stipulated will be transformed into actions: the Lyon-Turin Engagement Forum will accompany the progress of the project over the next few years and will not only be an appointment for discussion and updating, but also for verifying the actions implemented.
The managers of 11 construction and engineering companies involved in the ten construction sites of the project attended along with senior executives from TELT. They presented their projects on environmental protection and the circular economy, occupational safety, maximising local impact and fighting corruption. The event was moderated by Erika Vaniglia, the CEO of the Collège des Ingénieurs in Turin.
During the morning, Olivier Gil, the communication manager from the French network of the United Nations Global Compact, which TELT has been part of since 2015, emphasised that only through a genuine collective effort in connection with the Ten Principles of the Global Compact can we achieve a sustainable global economy.
A similar effort was also called for in his video message by Herald Ruijters, Deputy Director-General of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport, who emphasised in his introduction to the paper that this forum “is a step in the right direction to make investments in transport infrastructure more environmentally friendly”.
TELT’s president and CEO, Daniel Bursaux and Maurizio Bufalini, emphasised that “with the progress of construction sites, which will peak in the next few years with 7 TBMs at work and over 4,000 directly employed workers, there is an urgent need to unite companies around the themes of sustainability and safety at work: our construction sites are a challenge, but they are also an unmissable opportunity to set up practices that will set the standard in the world of large infrastructures.”
