At the Earth Day forum held here earlier this week by the Presidency of Meteorology and Environment (PME), officials commented on recent Saudi Gazette news reports that a mafia of illegal workers are rummaging through the city's garbage bins in search of recyclable materials to sell to scrap yards thus making it difficult for Jeddah to establish a modern recycling system. PME President Prince Turki Bin Nasser Bin Abdul Aziz told Saudi Gazette that the private sector should establish more recycling plants in the Kingdom's cities and even in its villages. He said that the municipality should separate recyclable materials at source which would take care of the problem of the mafia and added that increasing public awareness of the importance to the environment of proper recycling was a must. The forum also saw the exhibition of high-tech recycling equipment such as is used by waste management companies in developed countries. Meanwhile as this year's Earth Day celebrations draw to a close, Jeddah's de facto recycling system manned by illegal workers and African women continues to operate, as it has for years, as the only real recycling system that the city has. To further explore how this system works, Saudi Gazette traveled to south Jeddah where it found that poorly paid Asian laborers are working part time to supplement their monthly income by separating discarded soda cans and other items in scrap yards. These men are just one link in the chain of informal, unofficial workers who sift through the city's garbage to find items that can be recycled and then transport them to scrap yards from which these items make their way to plants which use them as raw material for recycling. In south Jeddah, an Asian laborer sitting amidst a mountain of discarded cans fished out of the city's garbage bins told Saudi Gazette about his part-time job. The man, who preferred not to give his name, was wearing a yellow shirt, black trousers and dirty white gloves. Many of the cans he was handling were still covered with garbage and most of them had sharp edges capable of cutting the worker's hands despite the gloves he was wearing. “What are you doing, brother?” Saudi Gazette asked him. “I work for one of the global shipping companies, but my salary is not enough to cover my expenses, and I have to send money to my family every month,” he said. “I work freelance with scrap yards separating the steel cans from the aluminum. These cans are my friends because they allow me to earn a little extra money,” he said. He added that most of those doing similar freelance work are legally employed in shipping container companies in the area. Scrap yards receive thousands of cans every day from a variety of unofficial sources. African women, illegal workers and even members of the city's street cleaning crews can be seen daily in all parts of the city fishing in garbage bins looking for discarded cans. That these cans have some value is so well known among the city's residents that many people, as a kind gesture, put their used cans in a plastic bag which they then hang on the edge of the garbage bin to make life easier for those who are searching through the garbage. The cans are then turned over to middle men who take them in pickup trucks to scrap yards which buy them and dump them outside their gates. The Asian laborer told Saudi Gazette that he comes to the scrap yard every day to see if there are cans to separate. Two or three times a week he finds bags of dirty cans heaped outside the scrap yard and then he settles down and begins separating the steel and the aluminum cans putting them into large white bags for which he is paid a few riyals a kilo. The work, he says, is dirty, and despite wearing gloves his hands are often cut, but the little extra that he earns helps him to survive and enables him to send some money home to his family each month.
