Abstract
Environmental protection requires adopting and implementing legal, economic, and societal procedures to limit the side effects of the massive real-estate and economic development in today's world. The purpose of this research was to investigate the implementation level of the eight main environmental laws affecting the construction industry in Saudi Arabia, and to identify the difficulties faced by practitioners to implement these laws. Using the descriptive analytical approach, this research described and analyzed the level of implementation of environmental laws using a Likert scale questionnaire distributed to 1000 organizations that work in 29 construction industry fields, in 13 Saudi Arabian regions. These questionnaires were filled out by engineers and professionals, authorized contractors, unauthorized contractors, individuals, and officials and owners. The one-way ANalysis Of VAriance (ANOVA) was applied to the data collected (at <0.05 level of significance), using SPSS Version 23.0 software. The overall environmental legitimacy implementation level in Saudi Arabia was found to be 2.95 out of 5.00 and a standard deviation of 1.13 indicating difficulties in defining the level for environmental legitimacy implementation in the construction industry. Results indicated that more attention was given to regulations related to the handling and disposal of radioactive materials, hazardous waste management, wastewater discharges, hazardous and dangerous substance compliance programs, environmental noise, general environmental requirements, air quality emissions, and external emergency planning with mean values of 3.23, 3.12, 3.10, 3.06, 3.05, 2.95, 2.80, and 2.75, respectively. Further investigation is required to evaluate internal auditing, accounting, and the availability of review teams regarding the environment in the industrial organizations in Saudi Arabia.