Lean construction has emerged since the early 1990s as a solution to wasteful practices in the construction industry that have limited productivity and inflated costs. Approximately 70% of traditional projects exceed their proposed schedule or as well as their budgets. Research studies by the Construction Industry Institute (CII) and the McGraw-Hill organization have identified the losses due to wastes in traditional projects as approximately 30% of the construction dollar. Glenn Ballard and the late Greg Howell, co-founders of the Lean Construction Institute (LCI), described lean construction as a new project delivery method that maximizes value and minimizes time, motion, and other wastes. While lean construction has reduced construction costs - often by 10% or more, and improved stakeholder satisfaction, it has not been focused on promoting environmental sustainability. In fact, many construction owners view the adoption of initiatives such as LEED as imposing higher first costs and representing a "green premium" that disincentives sustainable construction. This paper posits that the savings from lean construction can synergistically offset the green premium and promote the "triple bottom line" by a) Leveraging lean construction to offset the premium, b) Enabling a smaller carbon footprint, and c) Positioning industrial and systems engineers as lean facilitators in sustainable construction projects.
Forbes et al. (Tue,) studied this question.