Call for more action on country's mountain of waste

Experts say the UAE lacks the political will, financing and technology to address its growing problem in a sustainable manner.

Aluminium, plastic, paper and cardboard rubbish is sorted on a conveyor belt in Bee'ah's waste recovery facility at the Sharjah landfill.

DUBAI // The Government needs to create and support a recycling industry so the UAE can address its rising amounts of waste in a sustainable manner, experts said yesterday. "What we are lacking is the political will, financing and technology," said Fareed Bushehri, an officer at the United Nations Environment Programme's regional office for West Asia.

Mr Bushehri, speaking at the Middle East Waste Summit 2010, which ends today, said the problem extended throughout the Arab region. Improving waste management practices and encouraging recycling "depends on how strong regulations are and how strongly they are enforced", he said. While some recycling does take place, he said it was not enough to divert the huge amounts of waste that goes to landfills that do not always meet international safety requirements.

Glenn Platt, the environmental manager at KEO International Consultants and a delegate at the summit, said: "Sure, attitudes are changing, but still it is not widespread and we are not collecting a lot." His company, which specialises in consulting and management services in architectural design, civil engineering and infrastructure projects, has offices in the UAE, where it advises a number of Government departments.

"We need to look at regulating to encourage recycling practices and industry to participate," he said. A study released at the summit found that the UAE generated 22 per cent of the 22.2 million tonnes of waste produced in Gulf countries last year, second only to Saudi Arabia. The report estimates that in Dubai between six and 10 per cent of waste generated by households and the construction industry is recycled, far less than in countries such as Germany, which are recycling 70 per cent.

Not only does recycling cut the amount of waste going to landfills, it also makes far more efficient use of resources by reducing the need to find and extract new materials. Incineration is another option, albeit a controversial one due to associated emissions, with some of the waste used to make electricity. Dubai and more recently Ajman have announced that they will be resorting to this method of dealing with their waste - although Ajman's incinerator will be accompanied by a new landfill, the emirate's first.

Incineration, said Frederic Vigier, the chief executive of Trashco, a waste-management company, "is quite an easy solution to divert the waste from simply dumping". Setting up recycling schemes, which ideally involves getting residents and industry to segregate their rubbish into different streams, collecting and processing recycleables and reusing the materials in new products is more complicated to manage.

Mr Vigier said he Government has expressed intentions in this direction, but "the thing is to see how to convert intention to action". Mr Vigier said a main impediment to making recycling profitable was that waste management companies can dump rubbish from households, industry and other businesses at landfills either cheaply or for free. "How do you want to motivate, financially speaking, the process of recycling when in Dubai it costs Dh10 per truck to enter the landfill, when in Abu Dhabi it is free, in Oman it is free or a very small fee and in Qatar as well?" he asked.

Without legislation, there is no way to force people to stop simply dumping, he said. "We know very well that the recycling process costs money." On the question of how to encourage recycling companies to set up if there are no programmes to segregate the waste and no local customers for their end products, Jeremy Byatt, the director of environmental responsibility at the Sharjah-based Bee'ah, a public-private waste management partnership, said: "We have all these chicken-and-egg problems. You cannot ask people to recycle unless you have a place to process it."

In Sharjah, where the main landfill is growing by the size of a football field of rubbish 60 centimetres thick every day, Bee'ah has installed 2,000 recycling bins in the city and opened a facility to retrieve some recycleable materials from mixed household waste. Abu Dhabi has plans to introduce door-to-door recycling throughout the emirate later this year, although there is not yet a facility available to locally process what has been gathered from its earlier pilot project.

Last week, officials in Abu Dhabi said they were considering landfill fees but did not provide details. Dr Bader al-Harahsheh, the general manager of the Centre for Waste Management Abu Dhabi, speaking at the launch of the emirate's first facility to recycle construction and demolition waste, said: "There is a tariff system, we did not apply it yet. That is something we are in the process of implementing."

In Dubai, there are some recycling initiatives organised by the private sector and some household rubbish processed in a sorting facility that also retrieves some materials. Hassan Makki, the director of Dubai Municipality's waste management department, told an audience at the summit that the emirate was "working on technology and on regulating the waste industry", but offered no further details on the plan when approached after the session.

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