Saudi Green Building Council: Sultan A Y Faden

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Sultan A Y Faden, architect and head of the founding group for the Saudi Green Building Council, discusses the organisation and its work.

What is the timeline for the formation of the Saudi Green Building Council?

We plan to make 2009 our founding year and we expect to finish our own version of LEED within two to three years. Meanwhile we are establishing strategic partnerships with government and semi-government organisations in order to implement the green initiatives in their regulations.

Saudi Arabia works in zones and each authority has control on certain districts and cities, so it is easier for us to implement our green initiatives through broader government bodies, rather than dealing with all the municipalities and sub municipalities.

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I understand you are also to targeting the building materials sector?

Yes. Another parallel line is focussed on greening building materials. The main material in Saudi Arabia is concrete and this is not environmentally friendly. We have around 5000 mines for volcanic ash in the Kingdom and by adding this ash it’s like fly ash and reduces the amount of cement in the mixture.

The legislation in Saudi Arabia already supports this but people don’t follow it, we just need to highlight it and implement it. We do this by raising awareness with government and semi-government bodies and getting them to implement it totally.

More than half of the building materials in the Gulf are coming from Saudi Arabia and so this will have a positive impact for the region. There is no other country in the Middle East that has 350 ready mix concrete factories. There are also 11 cement factories and there will be another 25 build, while it has been banned in Europe and the USA to build any more cement factories because of its environmental violations. So our intention is to look for, and encourage, the use of other building materials while trying to green the current materials as much as we can.