Safety in green building construction projects in Singapore: Performance, critical issues, and improvement solutions

Abstract

The green buildings have achieved a rapid development recently with the surge in global interest in sustainable development. However, the emphasis placed on the issue of safety in green building construction projects remains minimal. This study aims to conduct an investigation and comparison of safety performance and critical safety issues between green and conventional building construction projects in Singapore, and to propose a series of feasible solutions to improve the safety performance in green building construction projects. To achieve these objectives, a questionnaire survey was conducted, and data collected from 30 construction companies were analyzed. The analysis results showed that the accident rate in green building construction projects was higher than that in conventional building construction projects. The results also indicated that, although the two types of projects shared the same top ten critical safety issues, six critical safety issues, namely, “exposure to hazardous substances”, “inhalation”, “moving/handling heavy loads”, “respiratory failure”, “being struck against manually operated tools”, and “being struck by falling objects”, were perceived differently between green and conventional building construction projects. This study also recommended a set of specific solutions to improve safety performance in green building construction projects, based on the feedback collected from the questionnaire survey.