Bee’ah to make Sharjah no-waste place by first quarter of next year

Automatic Restaurant on Buheirah Corniche Street is what you have to look out for when trying to locate the head office of Bee’ah, the environment and waste management company in Sharjah with near celebrity status.

The Bee’ah office has a partial rubber flooring made of recycled tyres at the entrance and is therefore, in many ways, more green than the green of the Lebanese joint.

Besides recycling tyres and transforming them into walkways, the organisation does other impressive work, too. Besides rubber, Bee’ah recycles 9.68 tonnes of paper and cardboard every day. They’re chronic award-winners — largest this, biggest that — and their wings are only set to spread further with Sharjah bearing the happy fruit of this win-win situation. There is a mission underway by Bee’ah to lead the Emirate toward a ‘zero-waste to landfill’ situation by 2015.

A recent study shows that waste generation in the UAE is at approximately 2.5kg/person/day. Comparatively, it is 2.1kg in the U.S; 2kg in Canada, and Beijing does really well at 0.85 kg/person/day.

The good news is that being the third largest such facility in the world, Bee’ah manages the Middle East’s largest Material Recovery Facility at a capacity to process 500,000 tonnes of waste per year.

As far as Bee’ah is concerned, it’s well on track to make Sharjah a no-waste place by the first quarter of next year. The group health and safety manager at Bee’ah, Mohammed Ahmed Abdulaziz — 23 years in the health and safety and who in the morning hours keeps his office lights switched off since daylight is adequate — says, even “based on risk assessment” – the goal will be met.

The residential recycling programme in Sharjah has had no small role to play in this target. Blue and green bins are placed all across Sharjah. And residents were handed a beginner’s kit — a flyer and two boxes of waste bags (blue and green bin liners) to bring about awareness and normalise the habit of waste segregation in households. According to Bee’ah, “The residential programme helped the diversion rate by 5 per cent to 10 per cent, allowing the company to advance closer towards its long-term goal of 100 per cent diversion rate from landfill by 2015”

According to a study, ‘In 1997, the United States Academy of Science estimated that around 6.4 million tones of litter enters the world’s oceans every year.” And that figure is 17 years old. Think of the ocean pollution you contribute to today by not recycling. And you don’t have to live in Sharjah to segregate your trash.

nivriti@khaleejtimes.com