The Environmental Performance of Prefabricated Building and Construction: A Critical Review

The building industry consumes a large amount of nature resources and generates significant environment impacts around the world. To mitigate the resource consumption and associated environmental impacts, prefabricated building and construction has been proven to be one of the solutions. Several studies have been published in the past decade to explore the potential environmental benefits of prefabrication. However, a systematic and holistic review in the context of environmental impacts of prefabrication is still lacking. The research aims to reveal state-of-the-art and identify the research trends regarding environmental performance of prefabricated building and construction. To do so, a 4-stage literature retrieval and integrated analysis framework is designed to efficiently capture and examine the subject of interest. The results revealed that the most focused research subjects in this field are environmental and energy performances assessment, and carbon and energy are most used metrics to evaluate these performances. Almost all reviewed research demonstrated that prefabrication was better than conventional building on environmental performance. Nevertheless, the most frequently used assessment method is process based life cycle assessment developed from previous conventional building analysis, which may not be the proper method for prefabrication building. Operation, maintenance, and demolition obtain less study attention and it may worsen the final decision. Present data source that usually based on other research may invalid the final results. The revealed trends and gaps can serve as in-depth information and motivation for researchers to make further progress in prefabricated building study.