Environmental Weight for Bid Evaluation to Promote Sustainability in Highway Construction Projects

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 CO2 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 CO2 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.