Investigating construction industry carbon footprint in Kampala Uganda

Abstract

The construction industry world over has grown over a prolonged period of time with design and technological improvements all brought about by increased and changing demand requirements of both the end users and the service providers. The end users are more concerned with quality service delivery and satisfaction of their needs whist the service providers focus on timely delivery of quality in the most economical way. The combination of both influenced the growth and incorporation of various technological machinery to ensure the delivery of quality in a timely and economical manner to the clients’ satisfaction. This research focused on the technology in the form of construction plant and equipment that is operated and powered by petroleum and thus is prone to producing environmental emissions in the form of carbon emissions, particulate matter and other green house gasses with an aim of establishing the carbon footprint of the construction industry in Kampala. The research was both qualitative as far as machine mechanical and maintenance states were concerned and quantitative when it came to measurement and establishment of the carbon footprint. Computations done basing on carbon monoxide emission statistics of the sample machines showed it to be approximately 5427.3513 metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions per year which were about 0.0000145% of global emissions as per the 2022 statistics. It is worth noting that this estimate is of a few machine samples taken off fifteen sites with in Kampala excluding the actual carbon dioxide emissions. Inclusion of CO2 emissions and an expansion of these samples would increase the significance of the research and definitely increase the total emission estimates per year from only the construction industry in Kampala. As far as the machine mechanical conditions were concerned, the research established that most of the machines lay within the fair and poor states basing on recorded data and information provided by their operators and none of the machines complied one hundred percent with the emission standards set by NEMA for both the new and old machines.