Jeremy Hodgson, managing director of Dubai-based Desert Turfcare, discusses water management and green waste recycling in sustainable landscape maintenance.
Transforming the desert into parks, gardens and football pitches may appear to be miraculous. But in the world of Jeremy Hodgson, managing director of Desert Turfcare, it is an exacting science that has come a long way in the GCC, yet has still further to go.
“Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than grass kept finely shorn,” wrote English philosopher Francis Bacon in 1625 – an eternal truth, seemingly, and all the more compelling in the midst of a desert.
Accompanying the rise and rise of buildings in the region’s urban centres has been a concerted effort to add a dash of green to sand-swept landscapes. And it is the responsibility of a select few including Jeremy Hodgson, managing director of Dubai-based Desert Turfcare, to do that.
“I don’t think the potential benefit of greenery in the environment can be over-estimated,” says Hodgson. “One of the limiting factors in green space development in Dubai, until recently, has been the availability of water; the need to allocate the available water for domestic uses. But great advances have been made in the provision of grey water. I think Dubai is probably at the forefront in its utilisation of such a huge volume of grey water in its green space development.”
Water is clearly the most critical resource for landscaping in a region that sees no more than several days of rain a year. While desalination has been the fountain of water provision in the region for some time, the distribution of treated effluence on a mass scale is a relatively recent development. ‘Grey water’, as it is commonly referred to, is far cheaper than potable water. The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA), for example, charges 3.5 fils per imperial gallon of potable water, and just 0.5 to 1 fil per imperial gallon of grey water. Add to this the fact that grey water is actually better to use for watering grass, plants and trees.
The result is that there are far greater landscaping opportunities for developers and municipalities alike. Dubai’s gated communities, for instance, are practically sold on their landscaping marvel. A look at the names of some of these residential areas says it all: ‘The Gardens’, ‘The Greens’, ‘Emirates Hills’, ‘Emirates Lakes’, ‘The Green Community’ and so on.
However, in tower block country, greenery remains far scarcer. “The need to bring landscape concepts into the wider urban development is lacking I think in Dubai as a whole,” laments Hodgson. “Part of the issue would seem to be the economic pressure on land. Many residential or commercial towers have little or no green space around them, other than what the municipality has provided along the roadside.”
Desert Turfcare, the core business of Desert Group, is one of the major contractors for irrigation works for Dubai Municipality’s roadside projects. The Municipality largely undertakes the greening element but contractors do the earthworks and irrigation engineering.
“Our emphasis is more on the macro end of the market where we can bring our infrastructure and experience to bear quickly and effectively,” says Hodgson, adding that the ongoing construction boom is providing good opportunities for new entrants in the market at the domestic landscaping end. “The market has been for many years very competitive but we see the market changing over the next few years, with the sheer volume of work to be done, to the point that it may reduce the degree of competition simply because it will be such a big market to contend with. So while landscaping companies are busy at the moment, we’re not necessarily over-busy. But this could certainly change in the next couple of years.”
With its 800 staff, Desert Turfcare busies itself with a wide variety of landscaping work; from five-star hotel resorts to the common areas of gated communities. Once the company wins a bid to develop a particular project, it is obliged to perform a year’s warranty maintenance on completion – much like the defaults liability period [DLP] that civil contractors carry out. This is the crucial period in which the landscape contractor aims to sufficiently impress the client so as to be retained on the development for a further year, or two or even three. Hodgson says that in around half of the major projects Desert Turfcare takes on, the operations and maintenance is retained for a considerable period.
“It means we’ve always got to be looking to uphold our standard with the view to providing value services,” explains Hodgson. “Some clients would be of the view that you should re-tender the work every so often and look for the cost savings. Others will look for continuity, high standards and a reduction in the disruption caused by changing over a contract – especially where there are perhaps multiple properties involved.”
Another trend Hodgson mentions is that of the larger facilities management companies tendering out landscaping services for the community green spaces they manage. Hodgson welcomes the increasing prevalence of FM companies in Dubai and the awareness of critical lifecycle issues that they bring to the market. “In many instances we work alongside or almost hand in hand with the FM departments of large resorts and of some commercial buildings,” he says.“So, as FM develops as a management concept or tool, we want to be in there.”
But in much the same way as FM can be misperceived as just cleaning and maintenance, Hodgson believes facilities managers themselves often understate landscaping services. “As FM companies get more numerous and larger, I’d like to see them encompass the wider implications of grounds care,” he says. “We’d like to see green waste recycling becoming more of a standard in facilities management. It should be a part of the integrated FM concept.
We want to develop the concept of landscaping within facilities management to encompass a wider range of activities than mowing the lawn and planting flowers.
“We want to develop the concept of landscaping within facilities management to encompass a wider range of activities than mowing the lawn and planting flowers – which is how landscape maintenance is seen. Landscape maintenance needs to coexist with facilities management operating practices. You tend to see elements of this and elements of that, but the links are often missing.”
Green waste recycling is a subject close to Hodgson’s heart. As is water management. And as are alternative eco-friendly energy sources, such as liquid piped gas (LPG) for use in landscaping utility vehicles. Being in the business of creating and maintaining green spaces puts an inherent responsibility on landscape contractors to also preserve and conserve, believes Hodgson. “We’re here to supplement the concept of green building, out of the building into the landscape,” he says. “There are some synergies between good landscape management and the green building concept.”
Hodgson believes the recycling of green waste is an urgent need in Dubai. In countries such as the UK, green waste must be disposed of in properly organised shredding and composting facilities. In many cases, the resulting compost is returned to consumers at a very low cost – in addition to being a contribution to a greener environment. The alternative is to dump green waste in landfills, as is done in Dubai, which leads to a build up of biogases that can have harmful effects in the years to come.
Desert Landscaping recovers a small percentage of its green waste by composting it. The rest finds its way to a Dubai Municipalityapproved landfill, at a cost, along with every other kind of waste. Hodgson would understandably rather be paid to re-supply compost than have to pay to throw waste away. The irony being, he notes, that the compost would typically be used to grow plants and trees that will eventually become green waste – the so-called ‘compost cycle’.
The problem with setting up green waste recycling facilities is that it’s not cheap. It requires space, machinery and labour. And the benefits are often more of an environmental nature than of a monetary nature, which may not bode well in a country focussed on the bottom-line factor. But Hodgson does not advocate government legislation to push the matter forward. Rather, he sees the likes of FM services providers as being well positioned to take it up.
“In an average landscape operation and maintenance manual, you rarely find anything relating to the management of green waste,” says Hodgson. “In as much as genuine FM companies are involved in conserving energy and resources, they need to widen their vision to encompass more elements of their property.”
Conserving water is something that FMs can perhaps better relate to than recycling green waste. However, embarking on a water management programme is often not seen as an economically viable step to take in buildings as water only accounts for a fraction of operational costs. Energy reduction is the primary concern of facilities managers.
For those bringing life to the desert, water is everything, and everything else must be determined by its availability and cost. “Water has to be plentiful, available and the methods of application need to be considered before you go beyond a design concept,” says Hodgson. “A design concept is going to be subject to some of the more mechanical elements such as availability of water, cost of water, which is becoming more of an issue here, and cost of energy to use water. The more water we need, the more energy is required to desalinate it and the more pollution is created. So there’s the monetary cost and the environmental cost.”
Though water management measures should be considered at the inception stage in order to be optimised during operations and maintenance, Hodgson says that this often is not the case in Dubai, despite the dry climate. His company is frequently called in on a completed project and asked to look at water management solutions. At this point, the options are limited as irrigation systems are already built.
One of the measures that can be taken is to move daytime watering schedules to night time, when the wind and sun have less effect on the irrigation system. An ideal ‘watering window’ is between midnight and around six or seven o’clock in the morning. “In order to achieve all the watering of the grass areas in that time, certain technical aspects need to be taken into consideration,” explains Hodgson.
“You need to be able to operate enough remote-controlled solenoid valves at one time in order to achieve the watering required. You would have to have the irrigation pipe work sized to deliver that volume of water. You have to have the pump set capable of producing the volume and the pressure of the water. You have to have the reservoir of water available to apply that volume of water within that window. So you almost have to look at the end application and turn it around and ask ‘How quickly do I need to discharge the water in order to perform within the client’s parameters?’”
As for computerised water management systems, these are virtually non-existent here, apart from golf courses, where they are standard. In places such as Australia and California, they have a proven track record. Local municipalities commonly use them to irrigate public parks. These systems are able to take several readings a day of temperature and relative humidity from various locations within a green space. With the derived data, the system automatically adjusts watering cycles and saves water – in addition to serving as a fault-finding reporting system.
Hodgson believes that it’s high time developers of resorts and large residential areas in Dubai harnessed the technology available to provide a better service in a more efficient manner. As always, this involves convincing clients of the benefits of investing a little more at the beginning in order to benefit in the long run. But unlike energy management solutions, it is much harder to prove financial savings for water management systems.
“It’s difficult to sell it on the basis that it will save x factor down the line,” says Hodgson. “We do have some rudimentary figures but it’s difficult to quantify and offer any form of guarantee. When water budgets get tight, or reservoir volumes start getting low, having the system is a way of being able to analyse where the water is going and to make the necessary changes.”
Hodgson would like to see FM services providers installing this technology as a standard feature in their landscaping dimensions. Water management software can be easily incorporated into a large-scale integrated irrigation management tool, and can be compatible with building management systems (BMS).
Having been in and around the GCC for 27 years, Hodgson has seen many changes in the local environment and attitudes towards it. While he senses a greater acceptance now of the need to spend part of a budget on looking at ways of conserving or at least not damaging the environment, he bemoans the fact that the hurried pace of development is outstripping any environmental measures that can be brought to bear.
“Whatever we can do in our own little way – be it conserving water, introducing LPG as a power source or recycling green waste – might be little in the grand scheme of things, but it can only increase,” says Hodgson. “So, at the end of the day, are we a landscape and irrigation maintenance operation? Or are we conservers of water and the environment? The answer is we’re elements of both.”
