Management of sustainability issues in construction works processes

Abstract

The implementation of sustainability in the construction sector depends to varying extents at global, national, regional, local, corporate and individual levels. In addition, it appears to be a lack of knowledge transfer to local construction project management according to managing the process towards sustainability. Accordantly to environmental legislation, it is the client that is the responsibility part, performing activities as owner and developer. By the standard ISO 15392: "Sustainability in building construction – General principles", it is possible to interpret sustainability for construction works accordantly, despite different backgrounds of stakeholders. A model was developed that optimizes the sustainability demands and abilities of a client, stakeholders and authorities relevant to a single or multiple construction works. Five cases were used as input to validate the model with the principles of the ISO 15392 standard. The cases studies were from different phases in the life-cycle of construction works and in different stages of construction project process. Furthermore, the cases represented buildings with various functions. The result of the validation implies a possibility to use the model to assess building construction processes to determine whether it is heading towards being a sustainable, partly sustainable or non-sustainable development.