Traditionally, the emissions embodied in construction materials have not been considered important; however, they are becoming crucial due to the short time-frame in which the emissions should be reduced. Moreover, evaluating the environmental burden of construction materials has proven problematic and the reliability of the reported impact estimates is questionable. More reliable information from the construction sector is thus urgently needed to back and guide decision-making. Currently, the building sector environmental impact assessments predominantly employ commercial software with environmental impact databases and report results without knowledge about the impact of the software/database choice on the results. In this study, estimates for the embodied environmental impacts of residential construction from the two most widely used life cycle assessment (LCA) database-software combinations, ecoinvent with SimaPro software and GaBi, are compared to recognize the uniformities and inconsistencies. The impacts caused by two residential buildings of different types, a concrete-element multi-story residential building and a detached wooden house, both located in Finland, were assessed, including all building systems with a high level of detail. Based on the ReCiPe Midpoint method, fifteen impact categories were estimated and compared. The results confirm that the tool choice significantly affects the outcome. For the whole building, the difference is significant, around 15%, even in the most widely assessed category of Climate Change, and yields results that lean in different directions for the two cases. In the others, the estimates are entirely different, 40% or more in the majority of the categories and up to several thousand percentages of difference. The main conclusion is that extensive work is still urgently needed to improve the reliability of LCA tools in the building sector in order to provide reliable and trustworthy information for policy-making.

Both the construction and use of buildings cause significant environmental pressures. The greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions imposed by buildings have been studied rather extensively, but less is known about other impacts. Still, climate change is only one harmful impact driven by buildings. Furthermore, no studies exist about how the other impacts are correlated with GHG emissions in the building context, and thus to what extent GHGs could be utilized as a more general environmental performance indicator. This paper fills these gaps by presenting a life cycle assessment of the pre-use phase of a modern concrete-element residential building with a very comprehensive life cycle inventory (LCI). The focus of the study is on the comparison of the accumulation of different environmental impacts relative to GHGs. The accumulation is analyzed from two perspectives common to building LCAs: building systems and different construction materials. The ReCiPe midpoint assessment method is utilized to reach wide impact category coverage. The study shows how GHGs act as a relatively good indicator for eight impact categories, but not for the others. The study also depicts that a very high coverage in the LCI must be reached to capture the majority of the different impacts. Many materials and building systems are considered non-relevant and are often excluded from building LCAs, which are in fact of great importance in many impact categories.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to build a tested model and framework for describing the structure and factors influencing customer satisfaction in the construction industry.Design/methodology/approachThe paper introduces a structural equation model illustrating the interdependencies of the factors influencing customer satisfaction. Data for the model are based on 831 assessments obtained from project customers with regard to the successfulness of the project.FindingsThe results show that customer satisfaction in construction is a complex phenomenon in which various factors have a different impact on the quality as perceived by the customer. Management and factors related to skills have a different impact on the factors describing the end result and methods of the project. According to this study, the contractor's ability to cooperate is divided into two directions: managing changes and communication. The result emphasises the significance of communication in project production. In order to improve their level of service, the contractors should focus on developing and improving their central processes. With regard to customer satisfaction, this stresses the significance of the entire selection of services and products the contractor offers.Originality/valueCustomer satisfaction has become a significant tool for measuring performance alongside the traditional, harder measurement tools. Although the demands of customer‐orientation and customer satisfaction have been acknowledged in the field, little attention has been paid to development of customer satisfaction and the factors involved.

ABSTRACT. Public-private-partnership projects are long term, complex and very challenging contractual arrangements and relationships. They bring new roles for public sector and also for private sector in terms of construction and services. This paper will go through some features of the Finnish PPPs. Proactive law focuses in practical views as regards contract law and contractual issues. The main target is to prevent problems instead of confronting them. This paper will clarify what proactive law is about in terms of contract law and contracting especially in PPPs. For instance, 20-40 years' partnership relation with PPPs brings up also dozens of different risks into the picture. This paper will discuss the risks and risk management in terms of proactive law and after that, focus on PPPs in Finland.

No abstract