SUSTAINABILITY ANALYSIS OF CONVENTIONAL AND ECO-FRIENDLY MATERIALS: A STEP TOWARDS GREEN BUILDING

In the construction industry, selection of sustainable structural materials during the design phase leads to move towards more sustainable construction. Therefore, there is a need to select more green building materials to be used in construction. Based on the promising vision of future needs for sustainable development this paper presents a comparative study between conventional and eco-friendly building materials using sustainability measures. A prototype of two storeys was constructed using eco- friendly building materials (integrated bricks, rice straw bales, M2 system, plain concrete, and Rockwool sandwich panels). A sustainable decision support system (SDSS) was used to compare between the structural building materials of the two structural systems. The results showed that the eco-friendly system had better sustainability rank (67%) than the conventional system (56%). In addition, the results of SDSS showed that the Eco-friendly system was better than the conventional system during the three phases of total life cycle assessment (manufacturing, construction and demolition) by 11%, 0.5% and 9%, respectively.