Sustainable Resource Management in Construction

About this course.

Sustainable resource management is the practice of using the resources a project consumes — principally materials, energy and water — as efficiently and responsibly as possible across the entire life of the project, so that less is wasted, more is kept in use, and impact and cost are reduced. It spans the whole project life because resource decisions are made and their consequences felt at every stage — in planning and design, in procurement, during construction, and at handover and beyond — and the most powerful decisions are often made earliest, long before anything is bought or built. Managing resources well is therefore not a single task but a thread that runs through the whole project.

The starting point is to see a project as a flow of resources. Materials flow in from suppliers, are transformed and assembled into the building, and generate waste along the way; energy and water flow in to power and support the work. Each of these flows has a cost — financial and environmental — and each offers opportunities to reduce, reuse and recover. Sustainable resource management is about understanding and improving these flows rather than treating materials, energy, water and waste as unrelated line items. This resource-flow view is what distinguishes resource management from ad hoc, one-off green gestures: it is systematic and covers the whole project.