An Eco-Innovative Framework Development for Sustainable Consumption and Production in the Construction Industry

Abstract

Sustainable consumption and production have been increasingly required in the construction industry. However, previous studies have not yet comprehensively developed evaluation tools and methods to implement sustainable consumption and production. To achieve this objective, we utilized the eco-innovation, which provides effective analysis of sustainable consumption and production for the construction firms by eliminating subjectivity and ambiguity of evaluations. We adopted the fuzzy set theory to overcome the uncertainty occurring from the judgments of experts and utilized decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory approach to analyse the causal relationships between our methods and evaluation criteria. The results showed that environment and sustainable consumption are the key factors, while life cycle assessment, eco-labels, and environmental certification as well as improving eco-efficiency are critical to realizing sustainable consumption and production. The study enhances the understanding of the major players to achieve sustainable consumption and production, and link sustainable consumption and production with the eco-innovative practices. Our approach also improves the assessment accuracy, and the results provide viable suggestions for practical applications.

Methodological Proposal for Recognition Systems in Sustainable Freight Transport

“…The idea of sustainable freight transport is motivated by the shortage of resources, increasing levels of pollution, global warming, and difficulty of waste disposal [25,26], and the desire to increase competitiveness and economic development [27][28][29][30]. However, there is resistance to the implementation of better environmental habits, because of the increase in costs in the short term.…”

“…It is able to reduce tradeoff in actions, disseminating the environmental gains of the process to society. However, the choice of experts influences decision-making [30,[36][37][38]. The expert system that uses fuzzy logic principles has an advantage over closed systems, since they stray from the concept of absolute truth to partial truth [39], more suitable for settings with multiple truths, decisions, and results.…”

“…The expert system that uses fuzzy logic principles has an advantage over closed systems, since they stray from the concept of absolute truth to partial truth [39], more suitable for settings with multiple truths, decisions, and results. Fuzzy logic for the construction of a methodological process in RS for sustainable freight transport aims to reduce distortions of the judgment of experts [30,38], reduce indecision [36], debug qualitative measures to deal with preferential language in a hierarchical structure [40], and emphasize the independent evaluation of qualification [38].…”

“…The advantage of treating each aspect of sustainability as a fuzzy set was the reduction of linguistic terms to determine the rules of inference [30,36,37,40,49]. Thus, it was possible to maximize all combinations with as few as possible.…”

“…Figure 2 presents the fuzzy architecture to develop the evaluation of sustainability in transport. The alternative method allowed a reduction from 5 30 to 5 3 , where the changes were composed of three blocks for inference, distributed in 125 rules. EcB1 represents the input variables of the economic aspect, SoB2 denotes the social aspect, and EnB3 the environmental aspect.…”