Green-lean approach for assessing environmental and production waste in construction

Abstract

Sustainability research in construction has been focused on the design and operation stages of projects. However, the production stage has received not much attention. Current sustainable construction approaches exhibit a disconnect between environmental and production waste management in projects. To overcome these limitations, an approach based on green building and lean production principles is proposed in this paper. Thus, a lean tool named Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is adapted to simultaneously assess environmental and production waste over the production stage of construction projects. This paper reports the application of the proposed “green-lean” approach in the construction of a hospital as a case study, analyzing the structural concrete work stage. The main findings showed the ability of the approach to find out the sources of environmental/productive waste, quantify them, and suggest reduction strategies. This also demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed “green-lean” approach for improving the sustainable performance of projects.