Integration of Sustainability Criteria and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Method into Construction Material Selection in Developing Countries: The Case of Vietnam

Abstract

A sustainable development concerning economic, environmental, and social aspects is a global need as well as challenge in general and especially regarding the selection of construction materials. However, it is assumed that the importance of sustainability criteria is different in developed and developing countries. This is relevant for the application of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment, a method that integrates the established methods for economic, ecological, and social evaluation (Life Cycle Costing, Life Cycle Assessment, and Social Life Cycle Assessment) without explicitly including importance weightings. This paper aims to review the reality of sustainable development in construction material selection in Vietnam, a developing country. A list of 18 sustainability criteria was set up by reviewing previous studies and using a questionnaire. These criteria were ranked and used to calculate the importance of weightings based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process method and a Likert scale. The results showed that the “price of material” was ranked as the first among the sustainability criteria. It is also pointed out that 42.06, 29.96, and 27.98 are the weightings of Life Cycle Costing, Life Cycle Assessment, and Social Life Cycle Assessment results, respectively. Besides, 11 obstacles for integrating sustainability criteria into material selection were identified in the questionnaire, and 4 out of them were marked as showing “high” importance.

Application of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment in the Construction Sector: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The LCSA is being applied in the construction sector, although to date only a small number of studies have considered all three pillars: 25% of all 171 studies focused on the construction sector and only 11% of all studies were conducted on the LCSA in the construction sector. These results mirror the statements of other studies [58][59][60]68,77,109]. It became evident that both non-construction-specific LCSAs and those related to the construction sector, in 2020, reached the highest publication numbers to date.…”

“…No review used the actual search terms we used, with 'LCSA' and 'Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment' rarely used [58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70],…”

Sustainability Assessment of a Low-Income Building: A BIM-LCSA-FAHP-Based Analysis

“…The large number of resources required for the construction and retrofit of buildings gradually brought sustainable construction into focus [24]. In this sense, the selection of suitable and sustainable building materials during the design stage has a direct impact on the entire life cycle of the building [25,26], promoting the reduction of its cost, allowing a better use of natural resources, reducing the generation of waste during construction and operation stages, optimizing energy consumption, and providing a healthier environment for users [27,28]. Therefore, several researchers conclude that the correct selection of materials is one of the simplest and most efficient ways to incorporate sustainability in the construction industry [25,29,30].…”

“…In this sense, the selection of suitable and sustainable building materials during the design stage has a direct impact on the entire life cycle of the building [25,26], promoting the reduction of its cost, allowing a better use of natural resources, reducing the generation of waste during construction and operation stages, optimizing energy consumption, and providing a healthier environment for users [27,28]. Therefore, several researchers conclude that the correct selection of materials is one of the simplest and most efficient ways to incorporate sustainability in the construction industry [25,29,30]. Despite the relevance of optimizing the construction materials selection process, currently, in practice, this is still primarily done empirically, based on the engineers' knowledge and experience, rather than numerical approaches [30][31][32].…”

Control of sustainable management according to multilevel combinatorics of homeostatic mechanisms

“…Nevertheless, bionatural systems are studied in greater depth, in particular, as to ensuring homeostasis, typification of its types and mechanisms, etc. Initial methodological bases of the stated and presented concept of ensuring sustainable management according to dominants of homeostasis are theoretic methodological developments of: I. Ponkin (on generation of homeostatic features within the state control system) [3]; A. Takhtadzhian (on individuality of effects of transformation mechanisms of biological and social systems influenced by external and internal destructive factors) [4]; V. Khlebovych (on advantages of regulation of various nature of processes within complex systems near their critical points as manifestation of the principle of minimum action) [5]; medical and biological groundwork presented in the [6]; applied developments of Trong Hung Dinh, Trung Hieu Dinh and Uwe Götze [7] on determination of stability criteria and use of the method for assessing life cycle stability taking into account economic, environmental and social factors of sustainable development.…”