Green Building Materials Products and Service Market in the Construction Industry

Abstract

The construction industry influences and accelerates national growth and development, but it, however, contributes to unsustainable and eco-unfriendly development which impacts on the economy and environment. To encourage investment in sustainable construction, this study made a case for green building materials (GBM) products and services market in the construction industry of developing countries, through an assessment of the benefits of GBM incorporation in construction projects. The study adopted an internet-mediated questionnaire survey approach and snowball sampling techniques to gathered data from clients, consultants, professionals, and contractors/sub-contractor in the southeast geopolitical zones of Nigeria. Frequency, Percentile, Shapiro-Wilk test, Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s tests, relative importance index (RII) and Kruskal-Wallis test were used to analyse the collected data. The study revealed that the green construction market is unsaturated and under-tapped. With high awareness and low adoption levels of GBM, it was concluded that the most important benefits of GBM that will trigger demand and supply of GBM products and services are improved daylight and reduced need for artificial lighting, improves the quality of life, Increase employees productivity and reduced absenteeism, improve occupants health and comfort, higher profit and return on investment, leads to construction professionals specialisation, reducing greenhouse gas emission from building, reduces toxicity in the internal environment, low operating and maintenance cost, and creates new job opportunities. The uniqueness of this study lies in the assessment of the views of construction stakeholders' in the five states that make up the South-eastern geo-political zone of Nigeria, regarding the key benefits that could trigger the uptake and incorporation of GBM in construction. Developers and Investors in the industry could invest in green construction since there is a ready and unsaturated market for it.

Rejuvenating the Market for Earth-Based Building Construction Materials in a Developing Economy

“…Based on the latent characteristics of these items, the component was named "cost and pollution-related benefits." The finding here is in support of the previous report on green building materials such as earth or laterite [28,41,43,45,56,57]. Earthen materials offer a lot of opportunities when it comes to the delivery of cheap and affordable building projects anywhere in the world.…”

“…The experts were divided into four groups for ease of assessment: architects, builders, engineers, and quantity surveyors.Since these experts are scattered across the six states within the study area, the questionnaire becomes appropriate to reach the participants [1]. In addition, these experts form the bulk of the built environment professionals' employees of construction-based organisations, and they play a critical role in the diffusion of innovative ideas and methodologies in the built environment [28,57]. The number of experts reported is 1252 [58]; this population was obtained in states such as Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, and Rivers states.…”

“…The benefits and full potentials of local and readily available building materials have remained untapped, and they experience a slow pace of usage in the Nigerian construction market [27]. This submission was affirmed by previous study, who found that the sustainable construction market is still largely unsaturated and undertapped in Nigeria [28]. This is because of the continuous dependence on imported conventional building materials to meet construction needs [29].…”

“…These materials are cheap and abundantly available in our locality in their natural forms. Earth-based materials are commonly and readily available, which makes them cheap for the building of houses, thus offering a reduced cost of construction [28,56]. Earth materials are economical because their maintenance and operation costs are low.…”

“…In the same vein, previous study proposed that greater awareness of the importance of using green building materials in construction projects could lead to a shift in preference for sustainable materials over imported conventional ones. They posit that knowing the benefits of sustainable building materials and concepts by clients, construction professionals, and other stakeholders influence decisions to adopt them in construction as the major hindrances are overcome [28,31].…”