JEDDAH, 17 July 2003 — In a bold step to make an environmentally positive project pay, Jeddah’s new recycling plant started operations recently.
It was built in partnership between the Jeddah Municipality, the government and the investment company Sadaca for Operations and Maintenance, with the government taking full ownership and control in 20 years. The plant was designed with a view to attacking the city’s mounting waste disposal problems.
A smaller pilot plant in Yanbu has been running for some time and proved the commercial viability of the project. More plants on the scale of the Jeddah site are planned for the east coast, Riyadh and Makkah — the latter designed to handle the extra demands on the waste disposal system from Umrah and Haj pilgrims.
The separation and processing lines of the plant, the biggest in the Middle East, began operation on a trial basis a month ago and were brought up to speed only recently.
Located to the east of the city, the plant currently handles about 1,000 tons of solid domestic and commercial waste a day.
“The plant will not only recycle waste efficiently, but hugely benefit our environment,” said Hussam Ali Basaleh, the Jeddah project manager who oversaw the development of the plant from open ground upward. “It will make a profit from the sale of clean, sorted waste.”
Initially the plant processes waste to the first stage. “We separate the waste into organic, several types of plastic, aluminum and steel,” Basaleh said. “The green organic waste is composted for one to three months and will then be sold as fertilizer.”
The various types of plastics and the huge volume of aluminum and steel drinks cans are baled and sold back to metal producers.
“We are planning to process the plastics beyond the baling stage,” explained Basaleh. “Washing and shredding will add value to the waste and make it more easily marketable.”
The familiar scavengers, so often seen collecting cans and cardboard from garbage skips around the city, point to a potential difficulty in the system. They sell their pickings to middlemen who then export the metals.
The sale of steel scrap in the Kingdom is governed by regulations that allow it to be sold only to smelters within the Kingdom. Aluminum currently has no such restrictions and export sales could adversely affect the supply of raw material to the plant. This would affect the income and therefore viability of the operation, which is set to provide a sorely needed service to the community. Moves to control sales of aluminum would help secure supplies.
Basaleh sees the project as a landmark. “If you want to protect and clean up the environment, then we have to design a system that is integrated from start to end of the process.”
