Abstract
Urbanization projects, understood as those supplying basic services for cities, such as drinking water, sewers, communication services, power, and lighting, are normally short-term extremely scattered actions, and it can be difficult to track their environmental impact. The present article’s main contribution is to employ the project budgets of public urbanization work to provide an instrument for environmental improvement, thereby helping public procurement, including sustainability criteria. Two urban projects in Seville, Spain are studied: the first substitutes existing services, and the second also includes gardens and playgrounds in the street margins. The methodology finds the construction elements that must be controlled in each project from the perspective of three indicators: carbon, water footprints, and embodied energy. The main impacts found are due to only four construction units: concrete, aggregates, asphalt, and ceramic pipes for the sewer system, that represent 70% or more of the total impact in all indicators studied. The public developer can focus procurement on those few elements in order to exert a lower impact and to significantly reduce the environmental burden of urbanization projects.
Highlights
Global goals of sustainable urban development [1] are focused on climate change and resource conservation, which can be applied to all levels of the construction sector, from the manufacture of materials to transport, construction, and the management of municipal services
The main objective of this paper is to develop a method to evaluate public urbanization projects in Spain to facilitate the introduction of Green public procurement (GPP)
The theoretical framework is divided into two parts: the cost analysis of a project and its adaptation to the environmental analysis, which determines the items of the project where the most significant environmental impacts are exerted
Summary
Global goals of sustainable urban development [1] are focused on climate change and resource conservation, which can be applied to all levels of the construction sector, from the manufacture of materials to transport, construction, and the management of municipal services. Among the construction sector main elements, developers are a powerful vector of change since they can prioritize buying products of a more sustainable nature. The increased awareness of developers is leading to significant changes in companies, implying the necessity of easy access to environmental information; procurement plays a key role because it covers whole supply chains [2]. At the material manufacturing level, Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) incorporate the results of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) inventory and assess material resource use and efficiency problems [3].
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