Material Selection Towards Sustainable and Lean Construction: A Comparison of Low Embodied Energy Material and Site Management Efficiency

Sustainable construction becomes the main agenda in the Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. One of the efforts is the material selection that builds the numbers of Embodied Energy (EE) or Embodied Carbon (EC), which is the total energy or carbon consumed throughout the life cycle of the material, starting from production, continue to construction until demolition. The life cycle has been a major consideration in the decision-making of material selection and the construction process. The use of available local materials becomes one of the approaches to achieving low EE for achieving sustainable construction. This study investigated the consideration of using locally available materials in supporting sustainable construction and compared the amount of EE before and after the construction process. The brick wall is determined as the scope for this study and the concept of Just-in-Time (JIT) is also be used to simulate the implementation of lean construction. There are two scenarios investigated in this study, which are construction process without JIT compared with JIT. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches through survey, observations, and focus group discussion (FGD) were applied as the research methodology. Further, the analysis also included the comparison of EE brick wall value on the common construction process and the JIT method. It is found that integrated consideration for sustainable and lean construction supports the achievement of sustainable development, where the implementation of JIT reduces the EE value and cost to improve construction efficiency.