Sustainable Procurement and Transport of Construction Materials
- Publisher:
- Butterworth-Heinemann- Elsevier
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Sustainable Construction Technologies Life-Cycle Assessment, 2019, pp. 161 - 209
- Issue Date:
- 2019-01-03
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| Filename | Description | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TamVWYLeKhoaN_2019_Chapter7SustainablePr_SustainableConstructi.pdf | Published version | 1.11 MB |
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Construction industry is the largest global consumer of materials. This huge share comes with the huge responsibility to account for economic, environmental, and social impacts associated with the materials through adoption of sustainable procurement strategies. Sustainable material procurement requires reconciliation among economic, environmental and social impacts of procurement decisions throughout the life cycle of materials. However, this is challenging mainly due to the broad range of economic, environmental and social impacts associated with different stages of material’s life cycle as well as the overlapping impacts that various supply decisions may have on multiple performance areas. Current practices of material procurement are, on the other hand, predominantly influenced by economy of construction stage and little attention is paid to environmental and social considerations over a long-term horizon. Moreover, material supply decisions made currently in practice are commonly traditional and tend to largely overlook the opportunities made available by advances in material science, computing, and decision-making areas. This chapter starts by presenting an overview of sustainability challenges associated with current material procurement practices to highlight the need for adoption of new sustainable approaches and technologies. It then continues by highlighting the challenges associated with adoption of new approaches and the important sustainability criteria to be considered in selection of new sustainable materials, technologies, and procurement strategies. A comprehensive decision-making framework for identifying the most sustainable procurement options in a construction project among various procurement options available is then presented. The framework is founded on the concepts of life cycle thinking and supply chain structure which are incorporated in to a computational module to compare the life cycle impacts of various supply decision based on the selection criteria determined collaboratively by different project stakeholders. The results of such comparative analysis leads to a ranking of various procurement decision alternatives comprised of different combinations of supply decision including material type, material supply structure, location of supplier, and mode of transport.
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