A Study of Water Resource Consumption in Indian Building Construction Sector

Abstract

Freshwater resource consumption is generating scarcity of ground water and surface water. Building construction consumes a great amount of water throughout its process. The materials used for construction also contains certain amount of embodied water which is generally not considered while calculation of water consumption. The water footprint of any building is categorised as: before/during construction process and building operation. The following problems are attempted in this paper: what are the areas where freshwater is used in building construction process, what is embodied water of building materials and what are the methods through which the freshwater consumption, as well as wastage, could be reduced? There exist various processes by which the freshwater resource can be replaced with treated grey water, but not in use in India. The objective of this study is to reassert, that greywater can be safely used in place of potable water in building construction; resulting in conservation of freshwater.