Proposed Sustainability Checklist for Construction Projects

Abstract

Sustainability is a vital and effective contribution to control the use of natural resources in a scientific and accurate manner without wasting work and preserving these resources to meet the current and future needs of societies. The goal of achieving sustainability in construction projects requires procedures that start from design through the use of recyclable materials or reuse. To ensure this, the standards must be defined and implemented in a precise and practical manner. Sustainability criteria for construction projects are organized in sets of questions to be answered by the construction projects officials. These questions take focus on the main building construction steps. The checklist considers weighting the questions according to their level of effect on the sustainability measures. In the current work, 22 construction projects were evaluated in the province of Erbil / Kurdistan region of Iraq through the inclusion of a set of sustainability criteria in the form of questions addressed to the engineers and project managers. The results were analyzed to determine the implementation approaches of the sustainability criteria. Economic, social and environmental factors were included and construction steps were weighed in the questions of the checklist according to these factors. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed checklist for estimating a sustainability score for construction projects. The results show high variations in applying sustainability measures in the various construction steps in all of the construction projects. The reasons are due to the absence or weakness of binding laws and the lack of adoption of comprehensive designs based on the pillars of sustainability.