Construction Phase Sustainability Index of Building

Bushra Rahman Kashish; Sushil Kumar Solanki

Abstract

The construction industry provides infrastructure, scope of job to society across the world. Apart from these benefits, the construction industry has some negative impacts on society and the environment. This industry is considered to be the major user of electricity and fresh water. It is also considered to be one of the major emitters of greenhouse gasses during the construction period. Across the world, there are many rating systems to assess the sustainability of buildings just after the construction when the building is in functional stage but, there are no such rating systems to assess the sustainability of construction phase. In this article, different factors which affect the construction phase sustainability were identified. These are the indicators for the surveys which were done to find out the weightage for each indicator and performance indexes of those indicators for particular projects. Then, these factors were categorized into nine categories namely Environmental Descriptors, Construction waste management, Water management, Materials, Health and well-being, Safety, Management, Gender Equality and peace and Energy, and 72 subfactors. Since it is not practical that all the factors have significant importance while assessing the sustainability of the construction process, it is critical to rule out those with an insignificant importance. The categorization of similar factors and surveys were done to narrow down the criteria. A list of 9 parameters and 38 subfactors were finalized for further analysis in this study. The methodology speaks about the framework of how the weightage and performance indexes were multiplied to calculate the sustainability index. After finding the CPSI Value a scale was proposed to assess the sustainability of the construction process. This methodology will help assess the sustainability in construction phase while providing some scope to improve the sustainability of the project and to implement sustainable standards where required.

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