Critical success factors for circular economy implementation toward sustainable construction: An iterative stationary approach

ABSTRACTS: The continuous depletion of natural resources, coupled with negative environmental impacts and increasing costs of construction projects, has drawn the attention of stakeholders in the construction industry to the circular economy (CE) concept. Over the past decade, the investigations of CE have increased significantly. Yet, this is not the case for developing countries, where the CE practice is still in an infant stage. This paper explores the critical success factors (CSFs) in order to advance knowledge of the implementation of CE in the Nigerian construction industry. The CSFs were compiled from previous studies and subsequently reviewed and classified through a semi-structured interview. A questionnaire survey consisting of the CSFs was subsequently sent to the construction professionals for their response. The relative importance index was further employed to determine the significant factors within each group. In this paper, an iterating stationary approach was adopted to further examine the factors by using Ginni's mean measure of dispersion to create a uniform weight for the index numbers. The Lebesgue integral measure to the mean value was used to provide a value range within the relative importance index (RII). This technique evaluated the impacts of the CE CSFs on the Nigerian construction industry. The results indicate a geometric mean stationary value of 0.7040, which signifies that the CSFs for CE implementation in the Nigerian construction industry are alleviating the fragmented construction industry through the stakeholder's collaboration having the RII value of 0.71, and the availability of technologies for end of the life management of buildings with the RII value of 0.7.