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Frontiers in Built Environment
Greening Construction Transport as a Sustainability Enabler for New Zealand: A Research Framework
2023-07-21
Lifecycle stage: Transportation
Policy challenge: Embodied carbon
Solutions: Avoid , Improve , Shift

The construction industry’s inherent fragmentation fuels Construction Supply Chain (CSC) complexity. Logistics form an essential part of the CSC in terms of costs and project management. In turn, transportation accounts for more than half the logistics costs due to construction materials being low-cost/high-volume, and most other logistics processes being business processes and not physical ones.

Construction transport is almost entirely road bound, one of the least sustainable modes with externalities far out of proportion to its numbers. Ergo, its optimisation presents substantial greening (de-carbonisation) opportunity, with potentially far-reaching sustainability impacts. The ASI (Avoid-Shift-Improve) concept considers activity, modal structure, and energy intensity/efficiency as transport carbon components, providing a fundamental optimisation framework.