Sustainable perspective of ancillary construction materials in infrastructure industry: An overview

Abstract

Climate Change is the hot topic in world scenarios and UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), a convention of the United Nations enables sustainable resource utilization. Disposing of industrial and agricultural wastes into air, water and land poses a great threat to mankind and the environment. Effective utilization of waste including hazardous nature can be subsumed pragmatically by the construction industry. Substituting agro-industrial waste materials into the construction process will conserve dwindling resources and lead to a step towards sustainability. The present study introduces a new dimension to construction materials by classifying them into exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories of major and ancillary construction materials. Major construction materials are building blocks of civil engineering whereas ancillary construction materials add value to the construction. Over the past decades, researchers have successfully applied sustainability concepts for the major construction materials. Ancillary construction materials shall be conceivably characterized as supplementary, commercial and expensive. They are less studied and lack research status at par with major construction materials. Bibliometric analysis helps to identify and understand ancillary construction materials' wide research gap over major construction materials. The article is aimed to showcase the differentiation in construction materials by intensive bibliometric analysis of construction materials and available traditional literature review of ancillary construction materials. Therefore, more collaboration of civil engineering researchers with other fields shall improve the research impetus in the field of ancillary construction materials. This multi-disciplinary approach shall be satisfactorily applied for addressing global concerns like climate change and industrial sustainability, which shall pervade the infrastructure industry. This review stresses the need for a shift in research ideology for comprehensive waste utilization in ancillary construction materials in line with major construction materials towards achieving resilient sustainable construction and the environment as a whole.