Integration of Sustainability Criteria and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Method into Construction Material Selection in Developing Countries: The Case of Vietnam

摘要

A sustainable development concerning economic, environmental, and social aspects is a global need as well as challenge in general and especially regarding the selection of construction materials. However, it is assumed that the importance of sustainability criteria is different in developed and developing countries. This is relevant for the application of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment, a method that integrates the established methods for economic, ecological, and social evaluation (Life Cycle Costing, Life Cycle Assessment, and Social Life Cycle Assessment) without explicitly including importance weightings. This paper aims to review the reality of sustainable development in construction material selection in Vietnam, a developing country. A list of 18 sustainability criteria was set up by reviewing previous studies and using a questionnaire. These criteria were ranked and used to calculate the importance of weightings based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process method and a Likert scale. The results showed that the "price of material" was ranked as the first among the sustainability criteria. It is also pointed out that 42.06, 29.96, and 27.98 are the weightings of Life Cycle Costing, Life Cycle Assessment, and Social Life Cycle Assessment results, respectively. Besides, 11 obstacles for integrating sustainability criteria into material selection were identified in the questionnaire, and 4 out of them were marked as showing "high" importance.