Bee'ah recycling plant in Sharjah turns trash to cash

Gulf News

Bee'ah recycling plant in Sharjah turns trash to cash. XPRESS takes a tour of the Bee'ah recycling plant in Sharjah to see how the facility is turning its reusable waste into profit. See more at: http://gulfnews.com/gntv

Transcript

00:00Our throwaway culture has become the daily scourge of the desert.

00:09The UAE generates 2.5 kilos of trash per person per day.

00:15That means more than 900 kilograms in one year or 400 more than France or Italy in 2002.

00:24This is the inside of Al Sharjah landfill, which is a massive recycling facility off

00:29Al Deir road in Sharjah.

00:33It is run by BIA, a joint venture between the Sharjah government and the private sector.

00:38Garbage trucks roll in from as early as 5am.

00:42Inspectors check every truck to make sure the payload is what they are declared to be.

00:48They remove whatever recyclables they can get their hands on.

00:51By closing time at 11pm, more than 1,000 trucks would have already dumped garbage into

00:56the facility, where they are either compacted or segregated.

01:04Reinhard Wilks, the senior landfill operations manager of BIA, said they do what they can

01:10to limit damage to the water table by lining the bottom of each cell to prevent seepage.

01:16The waste we are accepting here at Al Sharjah landfill is predominantly from Sharjah city

01:22and surrounding suburbs.

01:25The other areas of the emirate of Sharjah have smaller sites in the central region at

01:32the east coast where they deal with the waste from those localities.

01:38Heaps of discarded wood are kept within cells in the desert.

01:43We store the timber in organized storage bays and we can then sell the timber on for

01:52recovery which could be either for use as a fuel or for example for use in pulping processes

02:00for paper manufacture or cardboard manufacture.

02:06Millions of discarded tires are also stored, waiting to be recycled.

02:11Our estimates go towards somewhere in between 6 to 8 million tires at this facility at this

02:18point in time.

02:21We later visited the material recovery facility of BIA.

02:26It uses a combination of manual and mechanical sorting to recycle up to 30% of the waste

02:31brought in by the trucks.

02:33Hard at work, manually sorting recyclable items.

02:37Tin cans are taken by magnets, plastic bottles, cardboard, paper and used beverage cans are

02:45manually separated and crushed into blocks.

02:48They are then loaded onto trucks headed for recycling companies in the UAE.

02:55Up to 8,000 tons of construction and demolition waste are also recycled within the facility

03:00daily.

03:04By freezing the tires to minus 196 degrees, they become brittle and turn into crumbs for

03:10use as rubber metting or asphalt additives.

03:14Studies show this to be an environmentally friendly solution.

03:18Landfills are sometimes called unexploded bombs.

03:21But today, Sharjah is leading the way using the latest technology to turn trash into cash.

03:28Jay Hiloutine, Express.

03:34For more UN videos visit www.un.org

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