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Before the high-rise buildings of Qatar and the scenic Dubai skyline we could dump our waste and forget all about it. But times are changing, and we are quickly running out of room for this debris. Something needs to be done, but at what cost?
The Middle East is a lot like a house of cards. It has been built up very quickly over a short period of time, but what have been the effects of this speedy development?
The majority of GCC countries are ranked in the top ten in terms of waste production in the world. Around 120 million tonnes of waste is currently produced here and 55% of that waste comes from construction. That’s 66 million tonnes of waste created just from building up the land we live on.
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Businesses need to be established and homes need to be built, but all of this is carrying significant environmental challenges. Last year it was reported that landfills in Dubai are about to overflow and soon we’ll have no room to put waste.
Blue Stream Environmental Technology is a waste management company that has worked on construction projects such as the Burj Dubai to provide tipping machines and other products.
“Here the construction waste is not commonly recycled, instead it gets disposed into landfills,” explains the company’s managing director Suvarna Jeetandra.
Even though there is a need to reduce and re-use our waste, it isn’t all that easy. Recycling is an expensive business, particularly in the construction industry.
To break down products like concrete, which are commonly used as load bearing materials in buildings, they need to be crushed before they are re-used and this requires expensive machinery.
Further more, it costs just US $3 (AED10) to deposit waste into a landfill site whether it is a chunk of waste from your vehicle or a big hook-loader full. Businesses will therefore prefer to do this rather than pay for sorting bins and greener building materials.
“You are still allowed to throw everything into the landfill and that means that the effort by construction companies is not very high because it isn’t their core business and they don’t care about it,” explains Arabian Masters of Waste managing director Stephan Czech. “We cannot blame them though because being environmentally aware doesn’t always have profitable benefits.”
Jeetandra believes that the government needs to take action by putting funds into recycling. “It is not profitable to recycle unless you get subsidies from the government to do so.”
There has been a strong push from the government since HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai stated that all new buildings must follow green building programmes, but currently there is no legislation that states that companies must recycle their waste, which means there is no real drive to do so.
“Nobody does anything in a capitalist world unless he either makes money out of it or it is enforced by law,” says Czech.
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i would like to know the rate of the meachine.