Prince Turki Bin Nasser Bin Abdul Aziz, President of the Presidency of Meteorology and Environment (PME), while speaking to the media here Sunday after inaugurating the Earth and Meteorology forum called for businessmen to set up more recycling factories in the Kingdom's major cities and even in its villages. Commenting on Sunday's Saudi Gazette news report that a ‘mafia' of recycling scavengers are operating in Jeddah, Prince Turki said that there is a need for the private sector to become involved in the recycling business. Several companies have been set up to ensure smooth recycling, he said, but “more efforts are needed in this direction.” That, however, may not be an easy goal to achieve, because illegal workers and underpaid laborers who scavenge through the city's garbage bins looking for discarded material to sell to scrap yards are preventing separation and recycling plants from making a profit and are making it difficult for the city to implement a proper recycling system. Tim Parsons, the project manager of the SKAB Group North Jeddah City Cleaning Project, said that “by actively taking the recycling material for themselves, the scavengers reduce the amount of revenue available for the recycling scheme, which in turn affects the scheme's success”. He added that in their attempt to improve the standard of living, the scavengers reduce the efficiency of the business, which discourages other companies from investing in recycling in the Kingdom. Parsons explained that the separation plant in north Jeddah is a private business run by a contractor without any subsidy from the government. The plant receives loads of garbage from specific areas of the city. Workers at the plant then sift through the material and separate the recyclable items (such as plastic, cardboard, aluminum cans, glass bottles, etc.) which are sold to other manufacturers that use the product as raw material. That is the sole source of income for such plants. Parsons pointed out that separation plants are currently faced with the problem of a large underpaid expatriate workforce and illegal immigrants stealing their business. A well-known Saudi businessman, and former company director with experience in the field of recycling in Jeddah, preferring to remain anonymous, told Saudi Gazette that in 2003 the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs had a very ambitious plan to start a recycling program using private contractors to reduce the amount of garbage going to the landfills. By doing this, they were attempting to make sure that every reusable item in the garbage could be recycled. Jeddah was the pilot city for this project, being the pioneer in this sense for the Kingdom. Yet the program met with serious challenges when it was found that the products the plant hoped to recycle were being picked up at the source by illegal immigrants and an underpaid expatriate workforce. The businessman explained that although these people are only trying to raise some extra money for their own and their family's well being, they are making it difficult for the city of Jeddah to establish a proper recycling system. In many ways the scavengers who fish through Jeddah's garbage bins have become the city's de facto recycling system separating items by hand on the city's streets. However, as Parsons points out, the problem is not so much what they are doing, but how they are doing it. The scavengers themselves are not necessarily the problem as they are a reliable source of recycling material, he explained. However, the means that they use to scavenge adversely affects recycling and the environment. They rummage through the garbage bins and pick out materials that have a high monetary resale value – cutting out the recycling/separation plant and going directly to the source. They then take these materials directly to collection points where they are sold in a sort of black market of recyclable products, he said. The former company director explained that there were also other difficulties in the way in which the city's scavengers were separating recyclable items. The problem here is not only that they are competing with the separation plant, and are thereby undercutting government plans for recycling, but it is also that when going through the materials in the bins, they tend to create more of a mess, he said. “It affects recycling in the sense that these materials are taken at the source. It is not a clean operation, as there is always spillage, usually of organic waste, such as food materials and so on,” he explained. He added that as the scavengers have free access to the city's garbage bins and hence an extra source of income, they will continue their activities with no remorse for the damage that they are causing both businesses and the environment. He said that while it may not be an aesthetically pleasing sight to have elderly African women pushing shopping carts from garbage bin to garbage bin and making a mess, what is worse is that they are directly affecting the good efforts of the city and the ministry to establish a clean, organized and efficient recycling system. This will adversely affect the recycling efforts of the Kingdom by limiting the amount of investment that goes into the recycling business and thereby reducing recycling to simple separation operations that in the end will not fulfill the plan of ministry and the municipality of having a modern and efficient recycling system, he explained. No easy solutions While it is clear that there is no one, easy solution to the problem, Parsons said that the city should formulate and implement a well-researched recycling strategy. “Provide each dwelling and each apartment block with its own container for garbage and a separate container for recycling, in place of the present communal bin system which is emptied on a daily basis. The garbage container can be emptied two or three times a week and the recycling container one or two times a week. This will allow the municipality to see who throws away what and how much, creating accountability by each household which means easier enforcement and more accurate data in order to plan future improvements, ” he said. With this strategy of giving ownership of bins to local residences, we would see a more efficient and accountable set up for the recycling industry. The former company director agreed that the problem of the illegal workers and underpaid workforce who are scavenging recyclable material is a complicated issue that is hard to solve. “It's a matter of addressing the situation. They (illegal workers) exist; they are here and they need to be dealt with one way or another. Either make them legal, allowing them to seek proper jobs, or round them up and deport them. Whichever is easier,” he said. He added that, unfortunately there are questions about whose jurisdiction this problem falls under as the municipality and the ministry are in charge of the garbage bins and the collection of their contents, the police are in charge of maintaining order and the immigration services are in charge of illegal residents. None of these offices accept that the problem is their sole responsibility, thus leaving the scavengers to roam free and continue what they are doing, he said. The failure to control these scavengers is directly hurting businesses that are trying to improve the country by making it a cleaner and more environmentally conscious nation, he added.
