Establishing the Indicators of Sustainable Building Materials

Abstract

AbstractSustainable building materials are products with a relatively positive impact on economies, communities and the environment. Understanding the key indicators in developing sustainable building materials, which affect the economic, social and environmental aspects of buildings, is a critical perspective to aid their evolution. Research in sustainable building materials is relatively new, and therefore this study examined the existing literature on sustainable building materials in academic journals with the intent of identifying and clustering key indicators and proposing a conceptual framework for the development of sustainable building materials. This study employed a verifiable and reproducible systematic literature review of building materials, analyzing and scrutinizing 203 academic articles for the co-occurrence of keywords, using a mixed bibliographic and bibliometric method. It emerged from the study that the groups themed “Process”, “Material”, “Element” and “Technology” contained the greatest number of, and most statistically significant, indicators associated with sustainable building material. It was found that, in developing and evaluating sustainable building materials, sustainability, LCA (Life Cycle Assessment), embodied energy and recycling appear to be the predominant processes used; concrete, bricks, C&D (Construction and Demolition) waste, and fibre are the foremost materials; walls and roofs are the main building components; and composite, 3D printing, nanotechnology and prefabrication are the leading technology features. Also, the results of the analysis of interconnections between indicators revealed that a significant interconnection exists between embodied energy, LCA, concrete, composite and durability to the sustainability of building materials. Based on the taxonomy of indicators and the analysis of their interconnections, a conceptual framework for developing sustainable building materials was proposed in the paper.KeywordsBibliometric analysisBuilding elementBuilding materialSustainable building materialsTechnology