Assessing Sustainability Integration in Building Materials Regulation: A Qualitative Content Analysis of the Iraqi Guide for Building Materials Using the Triple Bottom Line Framework

The construction industry is one of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide, accounting for approximately 34% of total global emissions, while around 18% of total emissions result only from the production of building materials such as cement and steel. The sector is also highlighted by its high energy and resources demand, representing about 32% of global energy consumption, and nearly 50% of global materials extraction. Additionally, construction and demolition waste is also a critical environmental challenge, with global waste exceeding 2 billion tonnes by 2025 and more than 75% of the waste not being reused or recycled [1-3].

Therefore, adopting and developing sustainable building practices is no longer merely a voluntary value, but has become an urgent international necessity considering the growing need to take steps to address climate change [4].

In this context, the application of technical regulations, green policies, and building material specifications is considered a key tool for guiding the construction industry towards sustainability [5]. Recent studies on policies have highlighted the growing importance of incorporating the issue of embodied energy and embodied carbon into regulations and policies at the material and building level [5, 6].

In Iraq, as in other developing countries, regulations and specifications that could help promote sustainable building materials are often outdated, inconsistent and not properly enforced. Although Iraq has set its national development plans, the country still faces critical climate challenges such as rising temperatures and water scarcity, making it ever more necessary for the country to adopt more sustainable developmental strategies [7].

To address these issues, the Ministry of Construction, Housing, Municipalities, and Public Works in Iraq, with technical bodies and experts, launched the National Project for Technical Specifications and Codes (Iraqi Unified Technical Codes and Specifications Project) in the early 2010s.

The project aims to standardise, update, and unify all technical specifications in the construction sector [8]. One of the key outcomes of this initiative was the Iraqi Guide for Building Materials, first released in 2017, which covers the physical and chemical specifications, classification, and testing procedures for common building materials such as cement, gypsum, steel, aggregates, insulation, paints, polymers, and adhesives.

Since Iraq has committed to the Paris Agreement, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and national development strategies such as Iraq Vision 2030, it is reasonable to question whether such regulation, though exhaustive in engineering terms, is actually aligned with these sustainability commitments and can assist in the development of more sustainable construction practices in Iraq [9-11].

This study aims to evaluate the level of sustainability integration in the 2017 Iraqi Guide for Building Materials using a qualitative content analysis (QCA) approach based on the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework, which covers the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social [12].

By this evaluation, the study seeks to strengthen any future revisions of the Guide by highlighting feasible opportunities for improvement to contribute more effectively to national sustainability objectives.

A QCA method is used in this study to assess sustainability integration level in the Iraqi Building Materials Guide based on the TBL framework. This framework takes into consideration the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. QCA is an established data interpreting technique in which the text content is analyzed through a systematic process of coding and patterns identification, which has been effectively used in analyzing policies and technical reports as it enables examining text data in a structured way to extract themes and patterns [26-29].

In this study, the Iraqi Guide for Building Materials represents the primary textual data. To enable systematic analysis, the TBL concept was expressed as a sustainability assessment matrix. This matrix consists of 28 sustainability indicators that reflect the three dimensions of sustainability: 10 environmental indicators, 8 economic indicators, and 10 social indicators. These indicators were derived from the well-established principles of the TBL and were also supported by criteria available in related literature [14-21].

Each sustainability indicator was given a unique code as shown in Table 1 to form a clear coding matrix that simplifies the coding and analysis processes. It should be noted that the guide is available only in Arabic and there is no English version available, therefore, for the purpose of this study the codified indicators were translated into Arabic to enable direct coding of the original text.

Table 1. Triple Bottom Line (TBL) coding matrix

The content analysis was fully manual to provide a proper contextual understanding that can capture implicit sustainability references that could be overlooked in an automated text search. Furthermore, the manual process was considered necessary due to potential poor accuracy of content analysis tools when dealing with Arabic texts, especially because the Guide was only available in an encrypted PDF format, which was difficult to extract as accurate Arabic text.

The whole guide was reviewed carefully by the research team, quoting any paragraph with an explicit or implicit sustainability reference. The quoting and coding decisions were systematically reviewed and thoroughly discussed by the team to ensure that any disagreement happened during the analysis is resolved through consensus before developing the final QCA matrix.

A unit of analysis was defined as any technical requirement or interpretive text unit detected during the analysis process. These units included sentences, phrases, and paragraphs that explicitly or implicitly related to a predefined indicator and were defined as "sustainability reference". Some "sustainability reference" represent multiple codes because they clearly refer to several sustainability indicators. Thus, a "code occurrence" could exceed "sustainability reference".

Implicit sustainability references were identified through their contextual relationships with the predefined sustainability indicators, rather than depending on the presence of direct sustainability terms. For example, requirements related to durability, service life, and resistance to degradation processes like moisture, corrosion, and sulphate attack were coded under "Durability/Longevity" (ENV6). The same way was followed for other implicit references; for example, the uses of natural sand, gravel, rock, or natural asphalt were classified under "Natural Resource Use" (ENV3).

For example, the technical requirement in section 1/3 of chapter 8 specified the storage requirement for bagged cement, which should be stored in warehouses having moisture-insulated floors and good ventilation. This was coded as an implicit ENV6 reference because the objective was the prevention of material damage, despite the fact that durability was not been mentioned directly.

Similarly, the statement in chapter 17, section 5/1, describes the asphalt resources which are obtained from natural resources. This description was implicitly linked to ENV3 because it indicates direct dependence on naturally available resources, even though resource use or sustainability is not explicitly discussed.

The QCA of the Iraqi Guide for Building Materials indicated that some sustainability principles are integrated in the guide, although their integration is limited and imbalanced among the three sustainability dimensions: environmental, economic, and social dimensions.

The analysis identified 77 sustainability references which corresponded to 87 occurrences throughout the 17 chapters of the guide. However, the environmental dimension references showed an obvious dominance accounting for 82.8% of all occurrences, while the social dimension references ranked second with 12.6% and only 4.6% for the economic dimension.

This distribution indicates that integration of sustainability principles in the guide is mainly achieved by the incorporation of traditional technical materials characteristics with positive environmental impact rather than balancing environmental, economic, and social dimensions. This does not fully align with the definition of sustainability, which is all about balancing economic development, environmental protection, and social aspects to meet the needs of both present and future generations [13].

An important aspect in this regard is the prevalence of the indicator of durability/longevity (ENV6), which contributed by itself as much as 54.0% of all occurrences found. This means that sustainability within the guide is achieved via traditional engineering considerations regarding durability and longevity, rather than via the explicitly stated sustainability-related ones. In spite of the fact that durability of materials plays an important role in sustainable construction because of the potential reduction of the replacement rate, resource use and waste production over the life cycle of a building [30], this focus on a single indicator demonstrates a limited approach to sustainability.

Consequently, other factors come into play, generating another set of concerns. The critical indicators, which include embodied carbon, manufacturing emissions, water use, end-of-life management, and compatibility with the green building certification system, were not included at all in the Guide. This fact becomes relevant considering the international tendencies that become increasingly focused on life-cycle environmental performance and embodied carbon accounting for building materials [31, 32]. As building materials account for a significant part of global greenhouse gas emissions and resource use, the lack of any carbon-related or life-cycle criteria means that the Guide is not yet adapted to the contemporary international practice of low-carbon construction and circular economy implementation [2, 33].

The analysis of the Guide also indicates its limited scope from the perspective of life-cycle considerations. Though recyclability, life cycle costs, and maintenance cost can be found in the guide, their prevalence is quite small. Modern sustainability frameworks rely on the application of such concepts as Life Cycle Assessment and Environmental Product Declarations that allow measuring the performance of the material beyond the construction process and throughout extraction, manufacturing, use, and disposal stages [32, 34, 35].

Regarding the economic dimension, sustainability incorporation is the least integrated component. Four coded occurrences relate to economic indicators only, and issues such as local sourcing, supply chain resilience, market availability, operational efficiency, and innovation support were not addressed. Thus, economic sustainability was interpreted in the guide by focusing mainly on material cost. In relation to the situation in Iraq, such an approach is crucial since increasing the production of materials and reduction of dependency on foreign sources can help to develop a sustainable economy and promote post-war reconstruction [7, 9].

Socially, sustainability integration is also limited in scope. The references were found almost solely related to worker safety and issues connected with the toxicity of the materials. This aspect is crucial and can be considered consistent with the internationally accepted requirements [36]; however, there were no other social sustainability indicators, such as affordability, social equity, social well-being, stakeholder involvement, labor development, and engagement of vulnerable populations. In that regard, the concept of social sustainability can be regarded as risk prevention rather than promoting social value and inclusiveness.

It is important to understand these findings in light of the technical nature and specific remit of the Guide. Some indicators that were not identified, like embodied carbon, manufacturing emissions, water use, end-of-life management, local sourcing, supply chain resilience, market availability, operational efficiency, and innovation support, could be relevant to material selection and performance and thus could be included in future editions of the Guide. Other absent indicators, such as job creation, social equity, social well-being, stakeholder involvement, labour development, and engagement of vulnerable populations, may go beyond the immediate remit of a technical materials guide; however, identifying the lack of these indicators still helps in highlighting further possibilities for future revisions to encourage the selection of more sustainable materials both directly and indirectly.