World Construction Symposium

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Browsing World Construction Symposium by Conference "2nd World Construction Symposium 2013"

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    Factors affecting environmental health and safety in healthcare sector
    (Ceylon Institute of Builders, 2013-06) Saranga, B; Rajini, D; Sandanayake, YG; Fernando, NG
    Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) is a discipline, which involves creating a culture of health, safety, and environmental protection in a workplace. It provides workplaces that are injury-free and incident-free for all employees, visitors and contractors, as well as enhances the wellbeing of those parties and local communities. Therefore, EHS has a direct impact on morale of stakeholders, employee productivity as well as on organisational performance. Healthcare facilities are specific from others, and customers and workers in healthcare sector are exposed to huge amount of harmful contaminants compared to other working environments. There are many EHS issues that can be identified in healthcare sector, and inability to control such issues will become an epidemic to the whole society. Various factors determine the EHS condition of an organisation such as ventilation, lighting levels, noise, and design of workstations, safety measures in emergencies, to name few. Having a better understanding on those factors will enable the maintenance of effective EHS practices so that the negative impact of poor EHS practices can be minimized. Hence, the financial goals and objectives of the organisation can be achieved. Even though, such importance is there, studies on EHS is hardly found and a less attention has received to this subject. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to critically evaluate the factors affecting EHS in healthcare facilities. A comprehensive literature review was carried out to identify the EHS factors. Five environmental factors and eight occupational health and safety related factors were identified through the review and they be used to study the critical factors affecting EHS of healthcare facilities in future research agenda.
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    Use of sustainable materials in construction industry contractor’s perspective
    (Ceylon Institute of Builders, 2013-06) Illankoon, IMCS; Waidyasekara, KGAS; Karunadasa, WPS; Sandanayake, YG; Fernando, NG
    Buildings are the largest energy consumers and greenhouse gas emitters, both in the developed and developing countries. Therefore, it is a dire need in the present status quo to shift to sustainable buildings. Sustainable buildings can be identified as a spectrum of buildings, designed and constructed using methods and materials that are resource efficient and that will not compromise the health of the environment, wellbeing of the building occupants, construction workers, general public or up and coming future generations. In the process of construction of sustainable buildings, while striking a balance between the triple bottom line, environmental, social and economic sustainability, construction material is given a higher priority. Therefore, this research reflexes the use of sustainable building materials in the construction industry. In the research process, initially a comprehensive literature synthesis was carried out to get an insight on the concept of sustainability and sustainability construction. This was then followed by a questionnaire survey among the M1 and M2 contractors of Sri Lanka. Through the study it was evident that there is perfect knowledge available on the concept of sustainability even though only 48% of the contractors have used sustainable materials in construction. It is necessary to comment that sustainability has now become mandatory in order to tackle many environmental problems. Thus, the usage of sustainable materials in construction is at the verge of being a mandatory requirement in construction. Therefore, this research provides a firm basis to use sustainable materials in construction industry in the perspective of construction contractors.