Benchmarking the Material Use Efficiency of Building Projects

In the construction industry, reducing the quantities of engineered materials provides a significant opportunity of mitigating the environmental impacts caused by material production and processing. Although the efficient use of materials has been receiving considerable attention in the building industry, there has been little research aimed at measuring the material use efficiency (MUE) of a project. The goal of this study is to fulfill this gap by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) as a benchmarking technique to measure the overall MUE performance of a building project and to further compare the performance against peer projects in order to promote enhanced efficiency through target setting. In this study, the efficiency is measured by adopting the quantities of a variety of materials consumed during construction as inputs and the floor area of a built facility as an output. To generate a more reliable efficiency score, a stepwise variable selection scheme is first applied and then the MUE scores of projects are ranked based on their cross-efficiency. In addition, clustering analysis and DEA are fused to enable a more realistic target to be set for each input, thereby determining practical, yet challenging targets for each underperforming project. A sample of 12 healthcare projects is used as a case study to demonstrate how the proposed MUE benchmarking model can be used to measure and improve the MUE. The results reveal that the model enables projects to evaluate their MUE performance, recognize the gap with the best-performing projects, and help them determine the targets to become efficient.