The paper discusses the key issues and most acceptable approaches to environmental management in the construction industry. The author's approach relies on the cluster analysis of structural components of construction, subject to technological specific features of construction works. Providing that construction operations form a multifaceted set of activities, and each construction project is unique in terms of climatic conditions, natural environments and geographic coordinates, the front-end engineering stage of an object lifecycle should include simulation of the potential emergency situations apart from building computer models of a target construction object. This allows evaluating the extent of the environmental impact of a construction project in case of accidents that may occur during the construction and operation phases. Structural "greening" should become a vital aspect at each stage of the building lifecycle. Structural greening of specific flows will help to deliver environmental compliance indices to be considered in determination of the duration of each specific flow and a construction project as a whole. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.