George Sarpong-Nsiah
Civil Engineering Department, Accra Institute of Technology, Accra P.O. Box AN-19782, Ghana
Amevi Acakpovi
Electrical Engineering Department, Accra Technical University, Accra P.O. Box GP 561, Ghana
This paper deals with carbon emissions reduction through building material selection in housing construction using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. Drawing on the concept of Sustainable Development in the Environment (SDE), inadequate selection of building materials makes a significant contribution to carbon emissions. The achievability of the goal of SDE is in rethinking Locally Sourced and Recycled Building Materials (LSRBMs) selection decision making, in acknowledging cultural issues, towards the wider industrial use of Recycled Concrete Crushed Block Wall (RCCBW) which is about 66%, in carbon emissions, as good as Air-crete Hollow Block Wall (AHBW). With results derived from questionnaire survey with recruited civil engineers and architects, key sustainability principle indicators influencing the selection of building materials are identified, analysed, grouped and ranked using AHP, a concept of measurement through pairwise comparisons of tangible and intangible factors to derive priority scales in relative terms. This explained 17.27% cut back in carbon emissions for selecting Compressed Stabilized Rammed-Earth Block Wall (CSREBW) instead of AHBW. The lack of informed knowledge in the wider use of RCCBW and CSREDW and in the Ghanaian context towards future reduction in carbon emissions in the housing sector of the construction industry of Ghana. Subsequently, the study yielded the following theoretical, practical and policy implications: A new interpretation of existing building materials; Understanding the impact of building materials’ attributes; In effect, might be beneficial to universities and organizations to come up with training policies that aim to take advantage of the new technology respectively.
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Copyright © 2026 George Sarpong-Nsiah, Amevi Acakpovi
This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
