The construction industry is increasingly concerned with improving the social, economic, and environmental indicators of sustainability. More than ever, the growing demand for construction materials reflects increased consumption of raw materials and energy, particularly during the phases of extraction, processing, and transportation of materials. This work aims to help decision-makers and to promote life cycle thinking in the construction industry. For this purpose, the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology was chosen to analyze the environmental impacts of building materials used in the construction of a residence project in São Gonçalo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The LCA methodology, based on ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 guidelines, is applied with available databases and the SimaPro program. As a result, this work shows that there is a substantial waste of nonrenewable energy, increasing global warming and harm to human health in this type of construction. This study also points out that, for this type of Brazilian construction, ceramic materials account for a high percentage of the mass of a total building and are thus responsible for the majority of environmental impacts.
Sustainable construction is a complex endeavour, involving various stakeholders and resulting in situations that are incompletely described or underspecified. Traditional risk assessment methods require a detailed description of the system and safety, focusing on undesirable outcomes, losses, incidents and accidents. Developing this principle, this research describes a new way to deal with risk assessment in the green construction industry using a resilience engineering method based on the functional resonance analysis method and analytic hierarchy process methodologies. The functional resonance analysis method defines a systemic framework to model complex systems based on combinations of function variabilities during normal work. Therefore, to quantify the outcomes for risk assessment, this method was used together with the analytic hierarchy process in a case study during the modernisation work on the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro. The results of this case study demonstrate that the combined utilisation of the functional resonance analysis method and analytic hierarchy process can be utilised to recognise situations where developments could potentially be without control, which enables this to be used as a basis for performing indicators or a monitoring system. Furthermore, this combined technique can be used to assess and quantify the performance variabilities that may lead to occupational or environmental accidents, and provide new recommendations about how work processes should function, minimising production losses, incidents and accidents.
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