Opinion and choice strongly influence sustainability concepts. The building construction industry, in particular property developers, has been charged with promoting excess environmental impacts ranging from overuse of resources to pollution generation. This paper presents an application of sustainability concepts to building projects, as well as to the development of practices, methodology, and tools for evaluating existing buildings. This study will detail how current systems to evaluate building performance operate and how to improve them. This approach utilizes the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). AHP is a multicriteria method that evaluates the relative importance of criteria, subcriteria, and families of indicators, used in the proposed system of technical characteristics applied to the local culture. At the same time, AHP makes visible the critical factors involved in evaluation of sustainability of these buildings. A result of the application of this type of modeling is a system for sustainability assessment and evaluation of environmental aspects and socioeconomic perspectives of existing buildings in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 1. Introduction The term sustainable development has the meaning “emphasis on quality of life,” thus enabling people to live in a healthy environment while incorporating continuous improvement of social conditions and economic and environmental issues for the present and future generations [1]. A result of this awareness is that society is considering the construction sector to be a major source of impacts on the environment. This view takes into account the perceived excessive consumption of resources and generation of pollution during the phases of construction and use [2]. Occupancy consumes 80% of the energy expected to be used throughout the life cycle of a building. Occupancy represents the primary target for actions aimed at energy efficiency to reduce adverse impacts on the environment, human health, and economy [3]. It should be noted that while buildings are large contributors to environmental degradation they are important for the sustainability of business and quality of life, as city dwellers spend 80% to 90% of their time indoors [3, 4]. At this point, it is important to note that green buildings provide certain outcomes when subjected to specific requirements. These include minimization of disturbances of the ecosystem and other improvements throughout the life cycle as well as optimization of efficiency of resource management and operational performance leading to minimization of risks to human
References
[1]
O. Ortiz, F. Castells, and G. Sonnemann, “Sustainability in the construction industry: a review of recent developments based on LCA,” Construction and Building Materials, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 28–39, 2009.
[2]
G. K. C. Ding, “Sustainable construction—the role of environmental assessment tools,” Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 86, no. 3, pp. 451–464, 2008.
[3]
C. C. Menassa, “Evaluating sustainable retrofits in existing buildings under uncertainty,” Energy and Buildings, vol. 43, no. 12, pp. 3576–3583, 2011.
[4]
J. Burnett, “City buildings—eco-labels and shades of green!,” Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 29–38, 2007.
[5]
ASTM Subcommittee E 60.01, American Society for Testing and Materials, E 2114-08—Standard, Terminology for Sustainability Relative to the Performance of Buildings, American Society for Testing and Materials, West Conshohocken, Pa, USA, 2008.
[6]
A. Haapio and P. Viitaniemi, “A critical review of building environmental assessment tools,” Environmental Impact Assessment Review, vol. 28, no. 7, pp. 469–482, 2008.
[7]
V. G. Silva, M. G. Silva, and V. Agopyan, “Evaluation of buildings in Brazil: environmental assessment for the evaluation of sustainability,” Built Environment, no. 3, pp. 7–18, 2003.
[8]
A. Wisner, “Ergonomics in industrially developing countries,” Ergonomics, vol. 28, no. 8, pp. 1213–1224, 1985.
[9]
H. H. Ali and S. F. Al Nsairat, “Developing a green building assessment tool for developing countries—case of Jordan,” Building and Environment, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 1053–1064, 2009.
[10]
A. Libovich, “Assessing green building for sustainable cities,” in Proceedings of the World Sustainable Building Conference (WSBC '05), pp. 1968–1971, Tokyo, Japan, 2005.
[11]
J. Gibberd, “Assessing sustainable buildings in developing countries—the Sustainable Building Assessment Tool (SBAT) and the Sustainable Building Lifecycle (SBL),” in Proceedings of the World Sustainable Building Conference (WSBC '05), pp. 1605–1612, Tokyo, Japan, 2005.
International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment (IISBE), “Sustainable Building Assessment Tool (SBTool),” 2012, http://www.iisbe.org/sbmethod-2010.
[14]
U.S. Green Building Council, “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED),” 2012, http://www.usgbc.org/leed.
[15]
Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnologicas do Estado de S？o Paulo (IPT), “Avalia？？o do Desempenho Ambiental de Edifícios,” 2010, http://www.ipt.br/.
[16]
Comprehensive Assessment Sistem for Building Environmental Eficiency (CASBEE), “An overview of casbee,” 2012, http://www.ibec.or.jp/CASBEE/english/overviewE.htm.
[17]
Building Research Establishment (BRE), “BRE Environmental Assessment Method,” 2012, http://www.breeam.org/about.jsp?id=66.
[18]
H. G. Costa, Multicriteria Decision Aid—AHP Method, Abepro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1st edition, 2006.
[19]
L. F. A. M. Gomes, M. C. G. Araya, and C. Carignano, Decision Making in Complex Scenarios: Introduction to Discrete Methods of Multicriteria Decision, Pioneira, S？o Paulo, Brazil, 2004.
[20]
C. Parra-López, J. Calatrava-Requena, and T. de-Haro-Giménez, “A multi-criteria evaluation of the environmental performances of conventional, organic and integrated olive-growing systems in the south of Spain based on experts' knowledge,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 189–203, 2007.
[21]
D. N. Tiwari, R. Loof, and G. N. Paudyal, “Environmental-economic decision-making in lowland irrigated agriculture using multi-criteria analysis techniques,” Agricultural Systems, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 99–112, 1999.
[22]
T. L. Saaty, “How to make a decision: the analytic hierarchy process,” European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 9–26, 1990.
[23]
T. L. Saaty, The Analytic Hierarchy Process: Planning, Priority Setting, Resource Allocation, McGraw-Hill, 1980.
[24]
L.-A. Vidal, E. Sahin, N. Martelli, M. Berhoune, and B. Bonan, “Applying AHP to select drugs to be produced by anticipation in a chemotherapy compounding unit,” Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 1528–1534, 2010.
[25]
U.S. Green Building Council, “The Center for Green Schools,” 2012, http://www.centerforgreenschools.org/k12toolkit.
Environment Agency—Abu Dhabi Sustainable Schools, “Green School Audit,” 2012, http://www.sustainableschools.ae/gsa.aspx.
[28]
Ministry of Education, “Green Schools Pilot Initiative,” Ministry of Education, Ontario, Canada, 2012, http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/parents/greenschools.html.
[29]
British Council for School Environments (BCSE), Sustainable Schools—Getting It Right, 2006.
[30]
Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future (ULSF), What Is Talloires Declaration?2005.
[31]
K.-F. Chang, C.-M. Chiang, and P.-C. Chou, “Adapting aspects of GBTool 2005—searching for suitability in Taiwan,” Building and Environment, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 310–316, 2007.
[32]
Y. Dong, G. Zhang, W.-C. Hong, and Y. Xu, “Consensus models for AHP group decision making under row geometric mean prioritization method,” Decision Support Systems, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 281–289, 2010.
