The Middle East region seems to have amassed construction waste at breakneck speed. At the beginning of last year, Dubai alone was producing 30,000 tons of construction and demolition waste per day, according to a statement issued by Abdulla Rafea, assistant director general of health and environmental services at the Dubai Municipality.
This speed though might have been affected somewhat due to the current economic downslide. However, citing figures from Dubai’s land department, the value of total land transactions jumped 47.5 percent to AED 70.2 billion last year from AED 47.6 billion in 2007. While quite a few new projects have been shelved for the time being due to the recession, ongoing projects are however being completed. All this means more construction waste. Across the Middle East success stories of infrastructural development like new airports and expansions, man-made islands, resorts and housing projects have the downside of huge piles of construction waste lying in landfills.
The state of Kuwait saw a rush of construction following political and economic stabilization after the Gulf War, so much so that the small country was almost overrun by construction waste, prompting the government to take immediate action. The result was a proactive decision to let Environment Protection Industrial Co (EPIC) enter into construction waste recycling in order to reduce the load on the landfill and to limit the area that was being taken up by construction waste. According to EPIC’s marketing specialist, Khalid Abdul Fattah, the construction waste recycling plant set up in 2001 was the first of its kind in the entire Middle East region.
"It was a big initiative in the field of environment conservation and we are proud to say that our plant is the first recycling construction waste project in the Middle East. The aim was to save Kuwait’s limited land for residential areas and other developmental projects and to save the desert and maintain the country’s beauty and flora and fauna," said Abdul Fattah.The pace of construction in Kuwait sees a 5 to 10 percent increase every year, especially after 2004, when construction started spiking up. Today, the figure has reached approximately 4 million tons of construction waste per year.
The Kuwait Municipality along with the Dumping Sites Rehabilitation Committee coordinates with EPIC to facilitate the transfer of construction and demolition waste to the EPIC sorting and recycling plant. The plant receives anywhere between 7 to 20 thousand tons on a daily basis.
The waste is reduced in size and fed to the crushing plant. The finished end product that is aggregate gravel is categorized into different sizes, ranging from 5 to 50 mm. Another recycled product is sand and concrete granules ranging from 0 to 15 mm, resulting from sieving concrete and asphalt before crushing. It contains either asphalt or concrete sand and granules depending on the material crushed.
Metal that is a part of demolished waste is salvaged and sold to metal recycling companies at a rate of 230 dollars per ton. Before the recession hit the construction industry, metal scrap was being sold at the rate of 400 to 500 dollars per ton. Every month, the plant recovers 1000 tons of metal recyclables with a commercial value of 30,000 dollars.
While EPIC’s constructions waste recycling facility has helped in the rehabilitation of state land hitherto used as landfill sites, it also
products that can be put to use, especially since Kuwait lacks natural mountains from which rock can be quarried. The rest of the GCC, especially the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman with the exception of Bahrain are rich in natural rock.
The recycled gravel and sand is used in infrastructural projects to build temporary roads and secondary roads in Kuwait in addition to building the shore line. There are many uses of the recycled aggregates, says Abdul Fattah, stating that the Ministry of Public Works in Kuwait has issued authority letters to EPIC to utilize its recycled products in the civil projects taking place in the country.
Apart from having commercial value insideproduces valuable recycled Kuwait, the recycled products can be exported to other GCC countries as well. However, "it is difficult to find a market for recycled products in a country with abundant natural resources, as the recycled product is inferior in quality to the natural product, unless there is a government regulation on using natural resources for construction work and introduce alternative products like recycled products wherever suitable." says Abdul Fattah.
The UAE also did not lag behind in the race to recycle construction waste. By the end of 2006, Emirates Environmental Technology (EET) in partnership with Shaikh Mohammad Al Qasimi Holding was commissioned to start building a sorting plant for construction and demolition waste in Sharjah, which became fully functional by November 2007. The plant has very recently come under the purview of Bee’ah, the Sharjah Environment Company.
Klaus Leirer, project manager for EET, who headed the Construction and Demolition Waste Plant (CDW) plant said that the Sharjah landfill received 2.5 million tons of waste last year, out of which 1.6 million was construction and demolition waste, indicating that while the recession has caused a slowdown in the pace of construction, it is still enough to feed at least 2000 tons of waste to the plant every day.
"Around 80 percent of general construction waste that is received by the CDW plant can be recycled," says Leirer adding that "it is easy to sell wood, plastic and metal recovered from construction waste but difficult to sell paper as it normally becomes very dirty.
This problem can be averted if the sorting is done at construction and demolition sites themselves, which decreases the burden of presorting on the CDW plant and gives rise to cost-effective production and recyclables of more commercial value.
In process, the plant has ballistics separators to separate plastic, wood, metal and paper from the construction waste and magnetic separators to pick out reinforced steel. Manual sorting is also carried out to see that the pure construction waste is processed to produce aggregate gravel.
The CDW plant produces five different grades of aggregate gravel, according to different sizes. The aggregate gravel is used by Sharjah Municipality and construction companies to make temporary roads and by cement factories to make cement blocks for construction.
On the back of the success of the existing CDW plant, the Sharjah Municipality intends to construct another facility with the capacity of recycling 4,000 tons of waste every day. Looking at the construction waste generated last year in Sharjah alone which was 1.6 million tons out of 2.5 million tons, managing construction waste alone amounts to successfully managing 66 per cent of the entire waste.The success stories of the construction and demolition waste recycling plants in Kuwait and Sharjah can be emulated wherever construction and demolition waste is of a sizeable amount so as to make recycling a commercially viable operation.
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