The Factors Influencing the Assessment of Green Construction in China

Green construction plays an important role when green buildings are constructed with guidance of the ideology of sustainable development. We investigated more than 20 construction enterprises and 112 projects under construction or just being finished, which are all in China. Some data were collected, relating the physical surroundings, management and technical measures, as well as resources consumed during construction, etc. The results from the investigation not only display how "green" these enterprises perform in construction process, but also disclose that there are some underlying factors influencing the sustainable building activities and their effects. Hence it is more reasonable if these factors are considered when assessing and rating what construction enterprises achieve in performing green construction. Based on the investigation on green construction of different enterprises, the paper established five indicators for quantitative analysis. The five indicators represent the efforts by construction enterprises in saving water, energy, material and land, together with environmental protection, respectively. The quantitative analysis found six factors influencing the above five indicators to some degree, since significant differences in the means of the six indicators were reported on the projects investigated. Such factors are the building's function, location, floor area, structural type, decoration and goal for quality. Therefore, the paper suggests that it is more scientific to establish a classification system based on the above factors when rating construction enterprises and projects in China. The system is also helpful to identify different benchmarks for those factors.