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The greatest threats to the sustainable development on earth are rapid population growth and urbanization causing global increase in production and consumption of minerals and metals and other resources, resulting in adverse environmental impacts, such as limited supply of resources, excessive waste generation and the subsequent pollution of soil, air, and water. Such ongoing impacts are likely to become unsustainable in the medium to long‐term (Sabnis 2015, Giurco and Petrie 2007: McLellan et al. 2009). Building sector has grown as one of the major resource intensive, pollution emitting and waste generation sector. Sustainability, for built environment, is a complex concept which encompasses not just energy but wide range of resources─ renewable as well as non renewable, needed to support human activity. In the natural environment, non- renewable resources exist in fixed amount and so their continuous extraction will cause depletion and ultimately will lead to exhaustion. The future mineral production will be constrained by environmental sustainability issues. Declining ore grades are indicative of a shift from ‘easier and cheaper’ to more ‘complex and expensive’ processing in social and environmental terms as well as economic terms – greenhouse emissions, energy, consumption of chemicals and release of toxic chemicals, water consumption and pollution (Mohan and Mudd, 2014). The over use of high-grade metal ores and non-renewable fossil fuels may approach permanent depletion and can pose a severe threat to sustained industrial production (UNEP 2010). Indian building sector is growing at a rapid rate and consumption of natural resources is increasing exponentially which is going to have adverse impact on its sustainability. According to a joint baseline study on the automotive and construction sectors by TERI, Development Alternatives and GIZ, (GIZ, 2016), the gross demand of sand and coarse aggregates (crushed stones such as granite, basalt, limestone (other than cement grade, quartzite etc) is estimated to be respectively about 1430 million tons/annum and more than 2 billion tons/annum by 2020 as shown in figure 1 and 2. It is clear that the Indian construction industry is likely to face serious problems like challenges in material supply and rising cost of products if the predicted growth in demand continues. Import of raw materials is always an option. However, mineral import dependent countries are exposed to several risks, such as, commodity price spikes due to demand-supply mismatch, monopolistic behavior from exporting companies or countries, export restrictions by countries to fulfill strategic aims as well as supply disruptions due to instability and conflict in exporting countries (Arora et al. 2017) . Such trends are only expected to worsen in the 21st century (Philip 2009).Building construction is often strongly determined by local traditions, local climatology and available natural resources (Asif et al. 2005).Regional aspects can always be added as extra criteria separated from the building environment assessment tools to highlight regional environmental aspects (Wallhagen.M 2013).Life cycle assessment (LCA) tools are used to evaluate the sustainability of buildings. However, these tools cover resource depletion at global level but do not incorporate regional scarcity of resources. The production and assimilation of industrial wastes and building demolition waste in large quantities is also a major problem. These issues are largely concerned with national and local interest which needs to be integrated in quantitative metric in the sustainability assessment of buildings. In this study the regional problem of resource scarcity and resource replenishment measures like utilization of industrial wastes has been considered in evaluation of sustainability score of buildings which remains unaddressed in LCA tools.
Figure 1. Projected sand demand in India Source - Aggregate Business International, (2013)
Figure 2. Projected demands of crushed stone for construction sector in India Source - Aggregate Business International, (2013)