Environment Sustainability Assessment - Literature review Example

Sustainability Assessment By Student‘s Name: Presented to: Professor Institution: City: Date: Environment Sustainability Assessment Introduction In the recent decades, issues pertaining environment degradation has attracted a lot attention especially due to ever increasing large construction projects. As such the concept of sustainable development has gained popularity in various sectors but most importantly the construction industry. This was after the 1987 Brundtland Report on ‘Our Common Future’ was published by the World Commission on Environment and Development. The Brundtland Report referred to sustainable development as that which puts emphasis on development that meets current needs without making any compromise to capacity of future generations being able to meet their individual needs (Ugwu et al., 2006). In this respect, quite a number of national governments across the world have come up with programmes aimed at meeting the objectives of Rio de Janeiro Summit of 1992 and South African Summit of 2002. Nevertheless, the process of meeting objectives of sustainable development through national strategic approach is not an easy task whatsoever. Lack of proper understating of cumulative impacts and interactions of a number of sub-level sustainability indicators complexes the sustainability appraisal of construction designs. Therefore although there increased realization by various stakeholders of the need to design and construct projects that are sustainable, challenges are and would be mostly encountered at at the micro-level i.e. project level. In this regard, putting into consideration the magnitude of international attention on sustainability development in the recent decades, there is need to develop and implement technique sand methods that would provide guidance on sustainability assessment and decision making at various project level interfaces (i.e. from conceptualization to design, construction, operation and decommissioning). Conversely, a lot of attention is nowadays focused at construction projects, being one among the most active industries, in what ways it tries enhance socio-economic and environmental indicators geared towards attainment of environmental sustainability. Reason being, construction industry is currently playing a key role in regard to depleting non-renewable resources, generation of waste, consuming a lot of energy, and emitting high levels of gases (Ricardo & Luís, 2011). As such, due to the need of developing methods and techniques for assessing and reducing socio-economic and environmental impact, there are various Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) approaches currently being used. These LCA approaches integrates various issues fro instance resource depletion and climate change in the decision making process during evaluation and designing construction projects in order to achieve sustainable development. LCA approaches being applied in construction industries are for instance BREEAM (UK), Eco/Quantum (Netherlands), EcoEffect (Sweden), CAS-BEE (Japan) and LINX (Canada). In this regard, this research essay takes a closer look at case studies in which two different sustainability assessment methodologies have been applied in construction industries. These are ‘SBToolPT-H (Sustainable Building Tool for Housing in Portugal)’ (Ricardo & Luís, 2011) and ‘Triple-Bottom-Line (TBL) sustainability criteria for the selection of a sustainable flooring system in Tehran’ (Iran) (Bahareh et al., 2011). Sustainable Assessment Using SBToolPT-H Methodology SBToolPT-H is a robust tool applied in supports sustainable building design in addition to forecasting sustainability of residential buildings. According to Ricardo (2011), this methodology for sustainability assessment is entirely founded on the concepts of international Sustainable Building Tool (SBTool) method and is as well complemented by continuing work of ISO TC59 as well as that of CEN TC350. This assessment tool was a brain-child of several countries across the world since the year 1996 and it was also supported by the International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment (iiSBE). Therefore, SBTool has over the years received a lot of international attention and thus it is highly distinguished from other sustainability methodologies. Reason being it was exclusively instituted to enable its users reflects on diverse priorities and to become accustomed to the socio-cultural, environmental, technological and economic contexts of different geographical regions. Description of Portuguese SBTool version - SBToolPT-H According to Ricardo and Luís (2011), SBToolPT-H was developed through collaboration work by International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment chapter in Portugal and the University of Minho. During the initial stages, the man objective was to develop and propose a generic methodology to facilitate sustainability assessment of the renovated, new and current urban buildings in Portugal. In SBToolPT-H, there are three dimensions of sustainability development that are included and put into consideration with the final rating a building project being dependent on the evaluation of its performance with at lest two benchmarks. These include the best practice and conventional practice. Consequently, SBToolPT-H is based on a specific module for every type of building. At the first stage, during development of SBToolPT-H methodology was developed to assess sustainability development of residential buildings. This was based on the premise that high percentage of impacts from Portugal’s construction sector is related to the country’s housing sector. Sustainability assessment priorities defined in SBToolPT include, Developing a list of parameters extensive enough to be relevant and significant to compromise applicable building impacts but limited for practical use. Developing a building-level assessment method in respect to state-of the art methodologies while considering ongoing standardization. Establishing a state of balance between various dimensions of sustainable development i.e. social, environment, and economic. Limiting subjective and/or qualitative indicators that are difficult to validate -for instance technical and aesthetics innovation. Improving reliability by using accepted LCA techniques in environmental performance assessment. Producing and assessment output and certification label that can easily be interpreted and understood by both designers and clients. In this respect, SBToolPT-H has the capacity to compare and the general performance of several constructions projects and as well rank the importance of quite a number of sustainability development indicators of each project. The various indicators and the interrelated weighting system have the capacity to identify specific aspects during early design stages hence enabling design teams to provide a wide rage of mitigation measures against such adverse impacts (Ruiz & Fernández, 2009). Structure and assessment steps applied in SBToolPT-H This SBToolPT-H framework is based on four steps as illustrated in Appendix A which include, Quantification of building’s performance at the level of each indicator Normalizing the particular parameters Aggregating parameters Sustainable global assessment and score calculation SBToolPT-H methodology is based dimensions i.e. environments, society and economy, which are further categorized into twenty-five sustainability indicators (Appendix B). In order to quantify environmental performance of the aforementioned indicators, SBToolPT-H makes use of the various Environmental Product Declarations categories. This is followed by normalizing the parameters to eliminate scale effects during aggregation in each indicator. Triple-Bottom-Line (TBL) sustainability Assessment in Tehran (Iran) According to Bahareh et al. (2011), triple-bottom-approach (TBL) encompasses objectives aimed at achieving environmental social and economic prosperity in construction projects. Particularly in construction projects of Iran’s flooring systems. TBL approach apples the concepts of Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and LCA in selecting sustainable flooring systems. This was after conducting a survey on available flooring systems popularly used in Iran. The main targets of flooring systems were polystyrene, clay and concrete blocks. TBL’s criteria for sustainability encompassed three fundamentals which include the sociopolitical, economic and environmental and they were all applied in the analytical study. Subsequently, each alternative applied in the TBL approach was further divided into thirteen sub-criteria parameters as follows: Environmental Impacts (Depletion of resources, Emissions and wastes, Waste management, Environmental risk, Climate change, Energy loss, Embodied energy); Economic impacts (construction cost, material cost, maintenance and occupation cost) Socio-political cost ( building weight, vulnerability of area and social acceptance). In this methodology, the quantitative measure for sustainability is Sustainability Index (SI) and was calculated for every alternative i.e. polystyrene, clay and concrete blocks. Furthermore, the flooring system with the highest Sustainability Index was selected and regarded as the most sustainable solution. The main objective of using the top bottom approach in this research study was to establish the most suitable flooring system that could provide sustainability in Tehran. Based on the weighting of the various categories of environmental, economic and sociopolitical dimension, the most favorable flooring system was identified. Discussion In this case study, TBL approach was applied to evaluate the suitability of three alternative kind of flooring systems in reference to AHP-based LCA. This was a logical approach in evaluating the socio-political, economic and environmental impacts related to the activities and processes of construction projects. As such the TBL approach used in the case study of Tehran seems to be step-by-step method with capacity of integrating the comparative weights of different sub criteria and criteria at diverse hierarchical levels that have alternatives’ scores, in order to assess the impact of sustainability on the life cycle of components in construction projects. In this regard, TBL model is argued to be highly flexible and thus it has the capacity to be extended from the various flooring systems to other building material/component options for instance the internal and external wall, foundation and building structure. Furthermore, this model can be extended further to the entire building system. As illustrated in the TBL framework, the parameters used can be changed based on the focus or scope of the study. On the other hand, this methodology is can be employed in the entire life cycle of the construction project right form material extraction, to demolition and at the disposal in the end. In this regard, TBL model is thus applicable diverse geographical regions for instance Tehran that requires a lot of attention in order to set up sustainable development methodologies aimed at overcoming challenges experienced in sustainability development. State Of The Art on Sustainability Assessment Methodologies The main objective of sustainability assessments is collect and report relevant to facilitate decision making during the distinct phases of design, construction and use of buildings. As such, sustainability profiles or scores based on performance indicators results from a procedure in which applicable phenomena are analyzed and valued. Currently, it is probable to determine contrary inclinations; first, performance indicators usually used by various operators are characterized by their diversity and complexity whereas on the other hand there is a paradigm shift towards better usability via common simplicity and understanding. In this regard, developing sustainability assessments on the grounds of life-cycle approach can lead to considerable benefits for both the building occupants and owners which include, facilitating in reducing environmental effects, solving current construction problems, creating healthier, comfortable, and productive indoor spaces as well as reducing construction’s maintenance and operation costs. In both SBToolPT and TBL approaches, Life Cycle analysis puts into consideration all the necessary inputs and outputs required to acquire, own and dispose a building system and/or construction project (Ricardo & Luís, 2011). As such, these two sustainability assessment methodologies are especially applicable in where project alternatives that fulfill similar performance requirements, though they may differ in operation and initial costs, have to be evaluated so as to select the most appropriate in terms of cost savings. Nevertheless, developing methods of sustainability assessment as well as respective tools is a daunting task for both practicing individuals and academia (Ruiz & Fernández, 2009). Notable issue that should be considered is how to manage information and knowledge flows among different levels of indicator systems. One characteristic feature of the aforementioned sustainable assessment methodologies is the capacity to evolve so as to overcome quite a number of limitations. In regard to this research paper, the main objective at the moment is to expand and employ systematic methodology that supports a construction or building design that attains the most appropriate balance among various dimensions of sustainability assessment. On the other hand, it has to be at the same time flexible, transparent and practical as well as enough to be adapted to various kinds of construction and building designs and to the consistent development of technology (Bahareh et al., 2011). Consequently, according to Ricardo and Luis (2011), methodologies and tools used in sustainability assessment are all based on specific indicators. Such indicators provide information about the key influences of the industry in general and about the impacts of operation and construction/building projects. In order to come up with a set of generally accepted performance indicators, it is evident that its development would call for different weighting factors and parameters. This is evident in the TBL and SBToolPT methodologies of sustainability assessment. Such argument is a real response to the actual decision making needs because both the key indicators as well as their weight are mush based on economic, social and environmental impacts contexts in regard to their use . Bibliography Bahareh, R Rehan, S & Kasun, H 2011, ‘Sustainability assessment of flooring systems in the city of Tehran: An AHP-based life cycle analysis’, Construction and Building Materials, 25, pp. 2053–2066. Ricardo, M & Luís, B 2011, ‘Sustainability assessment and rating of buildings: Developing the methodology SBToolPT-H’, Building and Environment, 46, 1962-1971. Ugwu, OO Kumaraswamy, MM Wong, A Ng, ST 2006, ‘Sustainability appraisal in infrastructure projects (SUSAIP) Part 1. Development of indicators and computational methods’, Automation in Construction, 15, pp. 239 – 251. Ruiz, MC & Fernández, I 2009, ‘Environmental assessment in construction using a Spatial Decision Support System’, Automation in Construction, 18, pp. 1135–1143. Appendix A: Structure of SBToolPT methodology Source: Ricardo, M & Luís, B (2011). Appendix B: categories and sustainable indicators in SBTool methodology Source: Ricardo, M & Luís, B 2011. Appendix C: Structure of TBL methodology Source: Bahareh, R Rehan, S & Kasun, H 2011. Read More