Sustainable Building Construction: Tension between Material Efficiency and Earthquake Risk

Abstract

Increasingly, decision makers and society at large are focusing on ways of conserving natural resources. This change of perspective will certainly impinge on the construction industry. Several recent studies have developed material composition indicators (MCI) in order to assess the quantities of construction materials required for various building types. One major limitation of the MCIs used thus far is that they ignore locational factors and the associated site-specific boundary conditions such as building statics in seismic zones as well as the form of subsoil, which will dictate the needed level of earthquake resistance and thus the materials used in the design. The aim of the exploratory study presented here is to determine the extent to which site-specific parameters affect the composition of MCIs for certain building types. To this end, the influence of these parameters is estimated for various regions in Afghanistan. The results show significant correlations between the material consumption and site-specific boundary conditions.