Following last month’s feature on water conservation and facilities management, fmME talks to Abdulrahman Kalantar, managing director of Nakheel Asset Management and Design, about the pivotal role of FM in the organisation’s corporate social responsibility progamme and Palm Jumeirah
fmME: From residential developments to mega projects such as the Palm, what is Nakheel’s policy on installing, maintaining and measuring eco-friendly water management systems in the region?
Abdulrahman Kalantar: Our Nakheel Corporate Sustainability and Environmental Policies require us to ‘use natural resources sustainably’ by considering environmental performance and climate change in investment decisions, master planning, development design and construction, property and community management while supporting research and development.
At present the water consumption is monitored across all our Nakheel managed buildings. Our FM department works hard to minimise our water consumption.
Over the past year, we have installed thousands of water saving devices across our portfolio of managed buildings, and in our Omran Workforce Accommodations. (Omran is Nakheel’s initiative to house its workforce in accommodation that is built from environmentally sustainable materials. ed) Typically, these devices have consisted of flow reducing aerators for faucets, inline flow regulators for showers, bathroom hoses (shatafs) and toilet cistern bags.
For this year’s Gulf Water Week, Nakheel launched its Water Week initiative under the banner of its ‘Reduce It!’ campaign. This project commenced on Palm Jumeirah and is being currently rolled out across all our other developments. The Water Week initiative introduced our residents to special offers for water saving devices from our service provider.
Our service provider is working within our developments to tailor our residents’ water-flow rates (taps/showers/toilets) in order to efficiently meet the personal requirements of our residents. Households that avail of these offers can expect to reduce their water consumption by up to 20 percent. With average Dubai residents consuming over 60 gallons of water per day, this could mean saving almost AED200 per year for every person in their household.
That’s inside the house, but we also achieve significant water savings in our outdoor environments through our landscape designs and the re-use of treated sewage effluent (TSE) in our irrigation systems. Using carefully selected plant species as well as soil amendments (which retain irrigation water) and smart irrigation systems, we can reduce our irrigation volume by 50 percent.
We see TSE as a precious resource, so if we minimise its consumption in the landscaped areas then we can also use the TSE for cooling water in the district cooling process as well as in our fire-fighting networks. This balance of water re-use is a guiding principle in the very early stages of our master planning process.
We also encourage residents to use native/adapted species, providing mulch cover, grouping plants based on their water needs, as well as a host of other techniques while our landscape experts are on hand to give technical assistance and review resident’s garden designs where necessary.
fmME: Can you detail the cost, emissions and environmental impact/savings of the above management systems and the measurement tools you use?
AK: Our systems for tracking consumption were developed in-house by our FM department, as part of our corporate sustainability programme.
Our close alliance with DEWA has enabled us to receive monthly statement billing data in electronic format. We process this data into meaningful charts to identify trends and compare against our 2008 baseline year. The FM teams can readily check the performance of buildings and see the results of their energy or water saving measures on a daily basis.
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