Assessing environmental impact indicators in road construction projects in developing countries

Abstract

Environmental pollution is considered to be one of the main concerns in the construction industry. Environmental pollution has become a major challenge to construction projects due to the huge amount of pollution caused by construction projects. There are different types of environmental impact indicators, such as the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint, eutrophication potential (EP), acidification potential (AP), human health (HH) particulate, ozone depletion, and smog. Each of these environmental impact indicators can be linked to different phases of the construction projects. The overall environmental impact indicators can be divided into direct, indirect, and operational emissions. This paper presents a Building Information Modeling (BIM)-based methodology for the assessment of environmental impacts in road construction projects. The model takes into account the overall life cycle of the road construction project, which is divided into: manufacturing phase, transportation phase, construction phase, maintenance phase, operational phase, recycling phase, and deconstruction phase. A case study is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model. The proposed model solves a major problem for road construction project teams who want to assess the environmental impact indicators associated with their project prior to the start of the execution of their projects.