UAE ramps up efforts to curb construction pollution (page 1 of 2)

The UAE has become synonymous with ambitious construction projects, from the manmade archipelagos off Dubai's coastline, to the reclamation and transformation of a number of islands in Abu Dhabi. However such progress is coming at a cost to the environment, as well as to the health of residents around whom skylines are swiftly evolving.

Construction industry pollutants are contributing to a marked deterioration in air and water quality - a state of affairs put into sharp relief when you consider that one in five children in the UAE now suffers from asthma - and contractors are coming under renewed pressure from both inside and outside the industry, to clean up their act.

"Pollution requirements have definitely come on in huge amounts in the last few years," says Saeed Alabbar, Vice Chairman of the Emirates Green Building Council, an organisation of stakeholders within the construction industry, including developers, financiers, lawyers, government departments, consultants, contractors, and material suppliers.

"It is part of regulations throughout most of the UAE for contractors to have an environmental management plan in place that identifies potential impacts associated with each project, whether on water quality for a marine project or dust and noise for a land-based project," he continues.

"There have always been requirements for new developments to get building permits from municipalities," he adds. "What's happened is that those requirements for building permits, which traditionally were more concerned with structural elements and things like that, now include the environmental aspects of the project - how the contractors are going to manage environmental dangers, as well as the resource efficiency of the building."

Voluntary benchmarking on the rise

Those construction firms looking to bolster their green credentials have also turned to voluntary benchmarking such as that offered by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, which was launched by the US Green Building Council in 2000 and covers new commercial construction, existing building operations and maintenance, commercial interiors projects, and core and shell development projects. Projects must meet certain prerequisites to qualify for certification, and one of these prerequisites is specifically construction-related, requiring a site-specific plan to reduce pollution from construction activities by controlling soil erosion, waterway sedimentation, and airborne dust generation.

In Dubai, construction major Al Jaber LEGT Engineering & Contracting (ALEC) recently finished work on its new headquarters, which are LEED-accredited. According to the firm's Managing Director, Kez Taylor, attitudes to environmental issues are evolving within the industry. "There has definitely been a big trend towards more environmental awareness in everything that we do," he says. "On LEED-accredited projects we get monitored on how we are going about the construction phase, but more actual legislation wouldn't be a bad idea. It must become the culture of your business so that everybody focuses on it."

Taylor warns that while there has been a significant step forward in recent years, there remain large variances with regards the attention individual companies pay to environmental awareness issues. This, he argues, is why legislation should be tightened further.