‘Govt can derive income from waste recycling’

The Saudi government should set up partnerships with global companies to recycle waste as a source of revenue for the state, an economist has said.
Fadl Al-Bu’ainain told a local newspaper: “We should learn from the experience of neighboring countries such as Bahrain which awarded a garbage collecting contract to an international company, and made profits that were pumped into the national economy,” he said.
“It’s a win-win arrangement. The company does the garbage collection work, and also makes money out of the recycling work. This helps it pay the fees required by the Bahraini government and make a hefty margin through recycling. Diversification is now part and parcel of modern life, because it has strategic, financial and environmental benefits,” he added.
He said that recycling sites in Saudi Arabia are still “marginal.”
“The municipalities in various parts of Saudi Arabia say that they are recycling the waste, but this is totally untrue. This is just talk,” he said.
He said the Makkah Mayoralty, which complains about tons of waste after each Haj season, could sign contracts with leading companies to collect the garbage and recycle the waste.
A number of specialist studies indicate that the Kingdom wastes around SR 40 billion by unnecessarily dumping millions of tons of waste. Other countries rush to recycle these quantities of waste, and make useful revenues in the process. According to estimates by Jeddah Mayoralty, the annual volume of waste in Jeddah alone is about 2 million tons.
Yaseen Al-Attas, director of public relations for Middle East and North Africa at P&G, said that recycling of industrial waste is very important. “We work with partners to reduce the amount of waste and ensure new streams of revenue for our facilities here in Saudi Arabia.”
“We use modern technology to separate and sort out various types of waste, and send them to different sites for recycling. For us, industrial water is not a problem. It’s an opportunity. We capitalize on such opportunities for the benefit of our consumers, the environment and the company,” he said.
He said that in 2011, the company launched packages of Pantene that were made of plants.