Concomitant Impediments to the Social Acceptance of Sandbag Technology for Sustainable and Affordable Housing Delivery: The Case of South Africa

Abstract

There is a high level of homelessness in South Africa. Sandbag building technologies (SBTs) have been offered as economical and sustainable alternative building materials capable of speeding housing provision in South Africa. However, their degree of adoption in South Africa remains relatively low. Furthermore, limited research has examined the low adoption and social acceptance of SBTs, requiring thorough research. Therefore, this research investigates the key social barriers to accepting SBTs in housing provision. The study adopted a mixed method research approach that employs a comprehensive literature review in identifying 18 social barriers to using SBTs and a questionnaire survey of 228 building experts based in South Africa to obtain empirical data. The study findings indicated that the significant impediments were related to the lack of understanding of the benefits of sandbags, a lack of sandbag courses and training, and a lack of professional knowledge and skills, among others. A comparative analysis of the perceptions of the diverse categories of survey participants was conducted and discussed. This study’s evaluation of significant barriers offers government agencies and construction partners a framework to make realistic and well-informed decisions toward more sustainable and affordable housing delivery.

Strategies to promote the acceptance of sandbag building technology for sustainable and affordable housing delivery: the South African case

“…Ben-Alon et al (2020) argue that the acceptance of earth construction is dependent on the development of universal and user-friendly standards and codes. This result is consistent with the previous research by (Adetooto et al, 2022a;Adetooto and Windapo, 2022). More, SBT material and Sustainable and affordable housing delivery components standardisation are critical to its social acceptability.…”

“…It is crucial to get the backing of the executive management to increase the social acceptance of SBT for the development of affordable and sustainable housing in South Africa. These results are congruent with Belofsky and Zemskova (2018) and Adetooto and Windapo (2022). They found that integration among stakeholders (developers, government officials and experts) is necessary to facilitate the adoption of SBTs and ABTs.…”

“…Rinc on et al (2019) proposed that researchers focus their study on establishing design methodologies for earthbag and superadobe structures to increase their widespread acceptance. This result is consistent with prior South African investigations on alternative building methods (Windapo et al, 2022a;Adetooto et al, 2022aAdetooto et al, , 2022bAdetooto and Windapo, 2022). The study also highlighted that establishing a construction research centre where earthbag materials and methods can be investigated and assessed before being widely deployed is crucial to their social acceptance.…”

“…SBT is not widely accepted in South Africa (Grady et al, 2019). Adetooto and Windapo (2022)'s research outlines the present state of social acceptance of SBT in South Africa. However, given the degree of acceptability of SBT in South Africa, it is vital to create ways to enhance social acceptance of SBT.…”

“…To effectively and efficiently increase the societal acceptability of SBTs, it is necessary to develop measures that overcome housing market obstacles. However, even though a lot of research studies has been done on SBTs in South Africa (Adetooto et al, 2022a(Adetooto et al, , 2022bAdetooto and Windapo, 2022), there had been few or no empirical studies on the strategies for improving SBT social acceptance in South Africa. Given this context, and to promote SBT widespread acceptance, the study aims to identify the key strategies for the social acceptance of SBT.…”