ABU DHABI // A team of inventors is close to perfecting an innovative recycling bin that tells its users the amount and value of resources they have saved.
The idea for the bin – which will collect plastic, paper, metals and general waste products – came to Mostafa Nassar, a Dubai-based entrepreneur, about a year ago.
The business development manager of WMS Metal Industries, a specialist in garbage chutes for high-rise buildings, wanted to create a new product that made recycling “more personal”.
Mr Nassar said: “A lot of people know what recycling is and know that recycling is good. But nobody does it and nobody knows exactly how they can impact the environment. What is currently available [here] are bins that they get … from Europe, that are overpriced, that do not have that element of interactivity with the community, which is exactly what is required here in the UAE.”
On a budget of Dh2,000, he and a university student, who was then undergoing an internship at his company, searched Deira for a couple of weeks in an attempt to find the appropriate hardware to develop the recycling bin.
Although Mr Nassar wanted to keep the details of the design under wraps until he receives a patent, he said the bin was equipped with scales that were able to measure exactly how much waste has been deposited. It also has a processor that computes the significance in terms of saved resources. An interactive screen communicates the information to users.
Last September, he and his brother, Mohammed, the company’s managing partner, showed their concept to academics at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi.
“Because we are a small enterprise, we do not have the necessary budget to develop these ideas, we had to think of an innovative way to get it done,” he said. “We decided that we needed to find someone who is willing to invest. But we did not want money, we wanted expertise because we did not have that expertise. We did not know how to take it to the next level.”
The Masdar Institute team, led by Prof Bruce Ferguson, the head of the Institute Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was able to offer exactly what the brothers were looking for.
But the entrepreneurs’ dream almost ended with that initial meeting in Abu Dhabi when the Dh2,000 prototype failed to start.
“It worked after a few trials but I was panicking,” said Mr Nassar.
Despite the initial failure, the demonstration was convincing enough for Prof Ferguson to make the recycling bin the subject of his next class. His students spent three months preparing a business plan for the bin.
The project was initially supposed to end there, but work is continuing in a class by Mohammed Omar, an associate professor of engineering systems at Masdar Institute, in which 30 student engineers are working out improvements to the concept.
Mr Nassar visits the university about twice a week and is kept updated on the team’s progress.
He said the plan was to build another version of the recycling bin within a month and to eventually market the product in the UAE and abroad.
“Our core goal is to be able to produce innovative products in the UAE for the world,” said Mr Nassar.
“We got used to the UAE importing innovation and relying on the [world] to create this stuff, and we wanted to do the exact opposite.”
Prof Ferguson said if the plan that had been put forward was successfully executed, the concept “has a good chance of being a successful product”. He said collaborations between companies and academia were mutually beneficial.
“It is becoming more and more expensive to do research and development and many companies have stopped doing it,” he said.
Partnering with universities allows companies to conduct research inexpensively, while universities get to train students for real-life situations.
“I am optimistic we will have similar partnerships with other companies,” said Prof Ferguson.
vtodorova@thenational.ae