The phrase Triple Bottom Line (TBL) was first coined in 1994 in order to introduce social and environmental considerations in the traditional finance-centric measurement system of business performance. As a tool to measure sustainability performance, the three bottom lines refer to the environmental, social and economic aspects of sustainability respectively. The implementation of the TBL framework in the construction sector is considered to be insufficient due to the industry’s reluctance to change. The objective of this research is to create an assessment tool based on performance indicators that will encourage construction companies to continuously monitor and improve sustainability performance. Initially, the large scientific database Scopus is being reviewed. The literature study resulted in the identification of 71 performance indicators (24 for the environment, 24 for the society and 23 for the economy, respectively. Moreover, 13 assessment frameworks were studied, however, they fail to provide holistic, quantitative results. Thus, a new assessment methodology is developed where the initial inventory of indicators is refined according to specific criteria, weights are allocated to indicators in order to reflect their importance to the project and its stakeholders, and then, the weighted sums are calculated and plotted in spider diagrams and bar charts. The case study was employed as a research method and the purpose was twofold: Firstly, to investigate the current practices in the field of sustainability in the construction industry and, secondly, to examine the feasibility of applying the proposed assessment tool. The results confirmed the poor integration of the TBL framework in the construction industry and the suggested tool was confirmed to be comprehensive, simple and straightforward, and at the same time the results could be very easily communicated with the project’s stakeholders. The most important deficiency of the proposed model was found to be the subjectivity in the assessment procedure. For that purpose, four assessment criteria are proposed in order to limit the subjectivity inserted in the evaluation process. A conceptual framework is also proposed to help organizations adopt the assessment tool in their daily practices.

The European construction sector is responsible for the consumption of almost 32% of total raw material for realizing its projects (Benachio, Freitas, & Tavares , 2020). On a national level, this amount results to almost 50% for the Dutch construction industry (Nellssen, et al., 2018). The ever-growing population stresses the need for sufficient infrastructure and services which only results in an increase in demand and eventually an increase in resource consumption. The current trend of linear model, wherein the virgin raw materials are used to construct end products and eventually discarded at its end of life, poses a major threat for raw material extinction, and adds to the problem of excessive resource consumption. A viable solution for this problem is the introduction of circular economy concepts that aim at closing the raw material loops by considering all the current and future life cycle phases of a product in the initial development stages. Since the launch of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) in 2010, circular economy (CE) has gained considerable attention. EMF defines circular economy as “a regenerative system that aims to keep materials in a closed loop at their highest value” (Foundation, Cities in the circular economy: An initial exploration , 2017, page 7). CE focuses on much more than reduction of waste through recycling and aims at reducing the consumption of raw materials, designing products such that they can easily be disassembled and reused and extending product lifespan through maintenance and repair. CE differentiates the gradation options that help keep the materials and components within the loop by options such as refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, etc. One of the important parts of any city is its transport infrastructure that can also make use of the circularity principle. For many developed and developing countries, transport infrastructure accounts for the largest proportion of a country’s budget of any public-works program and consequently also play an important part in a nation’s economic and regional development. Studies show that current developing research of circular economy seldom focuses on the assessment of such transport infrastructure. Therefore, the main focus of this study is to understand the barriers of circular economy and to develop an assessment framework that can help the evaluation of transport infrastructure in terms of circularity.