MARKET CHAIN ANALYSIS OF MORINGA STENOPETELA A CASE OF KONSO ZONE, SNNPRS, ETHIOPIA.

Abstract

Building material selection is an important concern in building design and construction decision-making. Sustainable material selection is one of the most optimal strategies to achieve building sustainability. But comprehensive sustainability indictors-based assessment of building materials and selection is in problem. In addition, architects and engineers in charge of this choice often lack a holistic evaluation tools supporting them in building material selection. This paper presents a model development based on comprehensive sustainability indictors for building material selection to realize sustainable building development. To achieve this objective, a questionnaire survey of building experts was conducted to assess the current building material selection practices and to identify the key sustainable building material selection criteria. A set of sustainable building material selection criteria was identified: environmental, economic, technical and socio-cultural criteria. Hence the derived criteria were assessed and aggregated into a composite sustainability index by using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Based on this technique, model was developed for evaluating sustainability performance of building materials. The data collected was analyzed with the aid of Excel software and a variety of statistical methods including descriptive statistics analysis, relative importance index analysis, and Kendall’s coefficient of concordance. The key findings were the current building material selection practices ignored or underestimated environmental issues in the building projects. A case study was used to demonstrate the model developed for material selection for the building project and the findings revealed that the developed model is valuable and suitable for use in practice. Finally, it is appreciated that the model developed was successfully measured environmental issues and financial values simultaneously, however the conventional approaches does not measure environmental issues and financial values at the same time; they mainly focus on financial feasibility so this study also bridged that gap.