Takting the Sustainability of Construction Processes: An Environmental Assessment Method

Abstract

The building sector is key to achieving global sustainability targets due to its significant resource consumption, associated emissions, and waste generation. Life cycle assessment (LCA) evaluates the environmental quality of buildings to identify improvement possibilities. However, current research activities limit their focus on a few life cycle phases, while the construction phase receives none to little attention. At the heart of the problem lies the lack of information about on-site processes and the lack of tools to evaluate the environmental quality of construction processes. The authors developed a conceptual framework to assess this aspect using an interdisciplinary approach. The proposed solution is based on two main methods, namely LCA and Takt Planning (TP).Based on literature research we identified the main categories for environmentally relevant in-and outputs of construction processes. This allows a structured, standardized, and scalable assessment of each single process step from an environmental perspective We anticipate this method to be a starting point for a holistic sustainability approach for construction process assessment. Further development of this framework aims to broaden the current environmental evaluation in the building sector and to improve both, the construction process and the building product from an environmental point of view.

Process-specific digital recording of construction site LCA-inventory to identify decarbonisation pathways

“…Currently, most construction site activities are manually and hardly automatically recorded [14]. Further, the determination of the environmental impacts of construction site processes is not yet possible due to missing data [5]. As a result, emissions have so far been captured globally for the entire construction site or for large equipment like cranes (e.g.…”

“…In the context of Lean Production or Lean Construction, analyses and improvements about disturbancefree, error-free and efficient construction activities can only be enabled at construction process level [5,17]. Furthermore, to simulate construction processes, detailed process steps to provide a complete picture of all construction activities of a building are required [18].…”

“…In the city of Oslo for example, heavy-duty construction machinery causes over 20 % of total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions [4]. However, due to missing data about processes at the construction site, and insufficient understanding of environmental impacts of the construction stage, effects are currently hardly considered in detail in life cycle assessments (LCA) [5,6]. To map emissions over a building's whole life cycle, it is necessary to take the environmental impacts of construction site activities into consideration [6,7].…”

Hybrid Simulation for Value Stream Mapping to Improve the Environmental Performance of the Construction Phase

“…However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasted that the construction field has the largest potential for decreasing GHG emissions compared to other sectors (IPCC, 2014). Previous studies on the environmental impact assessment (EIA) of buildings have mainly focused on the product phase (modules A1 to A3 per BS EN 15978: 2011) and use phase (modules B1 to B7), while the construction phase (modules A4 to A5) is often overlooked or incompletely considered (Slosharek et al, 2021). Compared to other phases, construction is a short-term phase and is believed to emit lower emissions, so it has not attracted much research (H. J.…”