Thirumal, S.; Udawatta, N.; Karunasena, G.; Al-Ameri, R. Barriers to Adopting Digital Technologies to Implement Circular Economy Practices in the Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability2024, 16, 3185.
Thirumal, S.; Udawatta, N.; Karunasena, G.; Al-Ameri, R. Barriers to Adopting Digital Technologies to Implement Circular Economy Practices in the Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability 2024, 16, 3185.
Thirumal, S.; Udawatta, N.; Karunasena, G.; Al-Ameri, R. Barriers to Adopting Digital Technologies to Implement Circular Economy Practices in the Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability2024, 16, 3185.
Thirumal, S.; Udawatta, N.; Karunasena, G.; Al-Ameri, R. Barriers to Adopting Digital Technologies to Implement Circular Economy Practices in the Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review. Sustainability 2024, 16, 3185.
Abstract
The construction industry is a resource and energy intensive industry and thus, has been criti-cized due to rising environmental concerns. As a result of that it has gained heightened interest in the concept of Circular Economy (CE) over the last decade to its ability to promote the slowing, reducing, and closing production and consumption cycles of materials and products used in the construction practices. Digital technologies hold potential to enhance the construction industry's ability to integrate the concept of CE in its practices. However, a clear understanding of digital technology (DT) related barriers that hinder practical implementation of CE, appears to be lacking within the sector. In light of this, this study aims to identify the barriers to adopting DTs to im-plement CE practices in the construction industry. To achieve this aim, a systematic literature review was conducted by reviewing twenty-three (23) relevant papers published until January 2024 in Scopus database. The VOS viewer software was used to perform a co-occurrence analysis of keywords to identify new and popular study areas in the field and content analysis was used to analyse the major barriers to adapt DTs to implement CE in the construction industry. The study identified thirty-four (34) barriers to use DTs to implement CE and these were categorized into nine areas such as: infrastructure, organizational, regulatory, standardization, investment, nature of the construction industry, technological, stakeholder and data related barriers. These findings will be beneficial for construction practitioners and policy makers to adopt DTs to integrate CE practices in the construction industry.
Keywords
Barriers; Circular Economy; Construction Industry; Digital Technologies
Subject
Engineering, Architecture, Building and Construction
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
