Environmental Weight for Bid Evaluation to Promote Sustainability in Highway Construction Projects
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 147, Issue 4
Abstract
An effective green bidding mechanism is pressingly needed to drive sustainability awareness in construction projects. Nevertheless, several challenges have prevented the success of green bidding implementation in current practice, including difficulty in establishing a powerful bidding preference that has the capability to effectively encourage every construction-oriented party toward sustainability. This paper developed a novel, sustainable bidding model to identify a potential environmental weight for evaluating the environmental impacts using the amount of emission generated from construction equipment fleet operations. A highway construction project case study in Thailand was used to evaluate the performance and capabilities of the developed model in specifying possible environmental weights toward sustainable bidding. The model facilitated the quantification of different construction equipment mixes and their impact on the environment, based on the cost per kilogram of equivalent for inclusion in the bidding award preference. The model was validated to investigate the green bidding preference awarded to a contractor. The validation results confirmed the benefit of including the environmental weight in the bidder evaluation to provide better opportunities for contractors pursuing sustainability in bid winning under an impartial and more practicable environment. The developed model contributes to (1) promoting greater practicality in the existing confined green bidding mechanism by incorporating an effective sustainability weight for green performance evaluation of construction bidders and (2) reducing the substantial environmental impacts of construction equipment by offering incentives in the primitive bidding approach to create sustainable initiatives for public works contractors.
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Data Availability Statement
The data generated and analyzed during the study are available from the corresponding author on request.
Acknowledgments
This research was financially supported by the Kasetsart University Research and Development Institute (KURDI), Bangkok, Thailand. The authors express special thanks to the Expressway Authority of Thailand for providing the data for the case study analysis. However, any opinions, findings, and recommendations in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect any opinions of the funding agency or the Expressway Authority of Thailand.
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Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 147 • Issue 4 • April 2021
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 31, 2020
Accepted: Oct 14, 2020
Published online: Jan 31, 2021
Published in print: Apr 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Jun 30, 2021
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