As part of its celebration of the world's 40th Earth Day, Dar Al-Hekma College here is emphasizing the work that is being done by its recycling club's Naqa'a Environmental Enterprise. Dr. Suhair Al-Qurashi, Dean of Dar Al-Hekma College, commenting on the April 25 Saudi Gazette news report of a recycling ‘mafia' which contained a picture of an illegal worker climbing out of a garbage bin, said that she felt sorry that the city did not have a proper recycling system. “It is a very painful picture. Efforts should be made to promote environmental awareness so that a responsible recycling business can be established in the city,” Al-Qurashi said. Naqa'a Environmental Enterprise was established by the recycling club in Dar Al-Hekma College as a way to improve our society's environmental status under the theme ‘Live it green, live it pure'. Mona Othman, a nursing student at Dar Al-Hekma and one of the founding members of Naqa'a, believes in the importance of saving the Earth. “We aim to apply the concept of recycling as an essential value of the green life. Not only in our college, but also to help people to become eco-friendly, practicing and adopting this concept in Jeddah,” Othman said. “Our recycling club divided the college' s garbage bins into can bins, plastic bins, and paper bins. Then we sent the collected paper to a paper recycling company, but the problem is we cannot find a place for the recycling of soda cans,” Othman explained The recycling club is very enthusiastic and would like to see recycling centers established in every district in Jeddah, but they say that they need help from the authorities. “We have ideas about setting up recycling systems and we want people to become more aware of the importance of recycling and to promote it in homes, schools, and malls, but we need help from the authorities to execute our ideas. Society needs to reuse products in order to reduce air, land and water pollution,” she explained. The Dar Al-Hekma recycling club is working with King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) in a project to transform organic waste into compost. “Since we are interested in environmental projects, we contacted KAUST and we now collect our leftover food in the college and send it to them,” Othman said She emphasized that Naqa'a Environmental Enterprise needs financial and moral support and sponsorship in order to carry on. Purifying the air is one of the most important things that can be done to improve the environment, as Dar Al-Hekma discovered as part of its participation in the Black Cloud Project of California's Berkeley University. As part of the project, two sensors are used to measure the quality of the air inside and outside the college and the data is transmitted to a server by the Internet. “The studied results show that patterns in CO2 and volatile organic compounds (VOC) in Jeddah are higher than other cities because Jeddah has little rain to purify the air, few trees and plants, and no public transportation. Surprisingly, the results also show that the quality of the air inside Dar Al-Hekma is affected by all of these factors as well as the presence of liquid cleaners, sprays, markers, perfumes, and the lack of vegetation,” Othman explained.
