This is not only due to a lack of awareness of environmental issues and a weak recycling strategy but also demonstrates the need of better informing people about existing procedures to follow in case they wish to have a positive impact on the environment.
Arab News met with the founder of Trewind Recycling Mohamed Masoud to find out more about recycling procedures and try to understand the problems and challenges related to this kind of business.
The easiest way to recycle is to have two waste bins; one for recyclables (clean and dry beverage cartons; clean and dry aluminum or metal cans, plastic and glass containers; clean and dry paper material) and the other for non-recyclables. You can start by following this system in your kitchen and office and then try to expand it to other areas of consumption. The recyclables can be taken to one of our collection points like the Charity Organization Mawakib al Ajr and Hyperpanda stores in Al Malik Road, Al Rawdah and Al Safa (check trewind.com for up-to-date information). We buy the material you donate to any of the above locations and that money goes to Mawakib Alajr to help support orphans in need. We used to ask people to separate their recyclables into paper, plastic/glass/aluminum, and beverage cartons. However, like many other parts of the world we are starting to shift towards single stream recycling (all the recyclables in one container) since there are so many different types of each material to the point that the recyclables needs to be subdivided at a sorting station even if they are sorted by type of material at the source.
Trewind was established in 2009. Since its foundation, the company collaborates with Tetra Pak, the world's leading company for food packaging solutions (milk and juice containers) that promotes the recycling of its packages as part of its environmental responsibility. Tetra Pak neither recycles at its facility nor uses recycled materials in any part of their production process. However, Tetra Pak works closely with us to get as much as possible of their used products into the recycling stream to be used as Wood Plastic Composite (WPC), which Trewind produces here in Saudi Arabia.
Trewind has a recycling factory in the industrial city in Jeddah that specializes in recycling beverage cartons, wood, and certain types of plastic into a material we call GreenWood — a form of Wood Plastic Composite which combines the benefits of wood and plastic and can be used for a wide variety of applications such as flooring, railing, and car shades. It looks and feels like wood but, unlike wood, can withstand outdoor conditions without the need for additional treatment.
Before coming to our recycling plant, the collected recyclables first go to our sorting station in Khomra where the different types of materials are separated. The materials we don’t recycle are sold to factories that specialize in manufacturing paper, aluminum, and certain types of plastic.
I don’t think I can accurately answer this question. In addition to our public collection points mentioned above, we also have collection points at schools, hotels, compounds, offices, hospitals, and even private homes. However most of these are private collection points and not for public use. I also know that there are several private companies like SKAB group in the north of Jeddah, SARPC in Al Safa District, and Nesma Waste Paper Division that are waste management companies with their own sorting stations. Some of them export waste and/or sell it to local manufacturers while others specialize in recycling paper for example and have a collection arm.
I can’t say how many people but I know that we collect about 17 tons of waste per month from our collection points, in addition to the waste we collect from factories in Jeddah. The amount we collect every month is consistent which shows that people who start bringing their waste to the collection points continue to do so, which is a great indicator of commitment. Our aim is to have more people do the same.
Sooner or later environmental issues affect each and every one of us. We all know how fast and irresponsibly we are consuming our natural resources and wrongly disposing of waste. I think recycling is the least we can do to become part of the solution instead of the problem. Our main objectives can be summed up into several points: operate a community based source separation recycling program in Saudi Arabia, help to preserve our natural resources, reduce the amount of waste going to landfills, do our part in increasing environmental awareness in the Kingdom, encourage social responsibility in the Saudi population and produce eco-friendly high quality products that can substitute materials with a greater amount of negative impact on the environment.
We don’t have any subsidy from the government. Our only source of income is selling green materials (GreenWood), as well as our sorted recyclables to factories that can utilize them in their manufacturing processes. However, people often don’t understand the cost involved in recycling. A school or business for example might only have 10 kilograms of recyclables and wonder why we can’t pay them for it. The problem is that those 10 kilograms cost less than SR5 while the cost for operating a truck including the driver and fuel is over SR30 for a single pick up. When there are more materials being collected in one place, that allows us to be able to pay either the customer or a charity for the material. That is the reason we encourage people to use the collection points. We can set up collection points for homes and offices but a small fee should be paid to cover the cost of the collection. To be completely honest there are easier ways of making money, but starting a sustainable business that can benefit the community and the environment can give you a deeper satisfaction and is certainly the kind of approach we should seek for the future.
People in Saudi Arabia are not used to recycling and are not used to using wood in building and decoration since it is not a material naturally available in the Kingdom. Our main challenge is to educate people about the importance of recycling and the benefits of using green materials like GreenWood.
Scavengers certainly represent a problem since they use environmentally damaging ways of scavenging, thus representing a health hazard to themselves and the whole community. They manually go through waste without proper protection and make a mess around waste receptacles since they go after high valued items and leave the rest out. In addition many of them start fires in piles of waste to retrieve metals causing dangerous fumes. Tackling the issue of illegal workers through good policies legally integrating these people in society would certainly represent an important indirect step to the implementation of a proper recycling system.
I think kids are becoming more aware of the issue and hopefully that will lead to a new generation of proactive people. We see more and more youth groups dedicated to the idea of a cleaner, more sustainable society and this is a very welcome development in Saudi Arabia.
The government has worked on setting up sorting stations at the landfills to try to retrieve items. Now a new plan consists of setting up more sorting stations and dividing the city into nine zones appointing a cleaning company for each zone. This would be a good start if source separation is integrated into that system. The sorting stations that have been set up have been great at increasing the amount of recyclable material retrieved from the landfill but it still only constitutes a small percentage of the recyclables being consumed. Once the recyclables have been mixed with regular waste they are much harder to retrieve. I think a real solution could only derive from a governmental long-term, ambitious and wide-ranging plan aiming at solving the problem of illegal workers, educating people about the importance of environmental issues and the use of green material in public spaces, subsidizing private companies that enter the business and setting up community recycling collection points in each neighborhood or providing each dwelling with its own container for recycling. Giving ownership of bins to local residences would allow the municipality to enforce recycling and provide more accurate data.
