Abu Dhabi Launches Education Effort to Improve Waste Management

Abu Dhabi’s Environment Agency (EAD) wants industrial leaders, workers, and average citizens to do a better job at waste management. They want to reduce both litter and the consumption of single-use plastics. To achieve that, they just launched an educational campaign aimed at the industrial sector.

From now through the end of the year, the EAD will work with companies to educate management and employees alike. The educational campaign will focus on:

• corporate social responsibility
• citizen cleanups and research
• environmental awareness
• awareness of plastic consumption.

If all goes as planned, industrial companies and their employees will be more aware of the importance of proper waste management by the end of the year. Whether or not increased awareness leads to demonstrable action remains to be seen.

It Starts with Awareness

Any effort to change human behavior starts with making people aware of that behavior and why it is not good. With that in mind, it’s reasonable to expect the EAD’s educational campaign to place a heavy focus on plastic waste. For all intents and purposes, plastic waste is the waste management bogeyman everyone is afraid of.

As the thinking goes, people need to know just how much plastic is produced and discarded. Individuals need to be made aware of their own plastic consumption. Meanwhile, industrial companies need to know how their behaviors impact the plastic waste stream.

Awareness Leads to Action

Making people aware of proper waste management is only the starting point. If addressed properly, efforts at increasing awareness should lead to action. With that in mind, EAD hopes to encourage average citizens to get involved in local cleanup efforts. They want to see people pitching in to address litter problems at the local level.

Things are less clear in terms of actions the EAD hopes industrial companies take. If regulators are not entertaining the possibility of encouraging a robust industrial recycling program, they should start looking in that direction.

Industrial Recycling Works

It may be that residential and consumer recycling cannot be achieved profitably. The same is not true of industrial recycling. It works, and companies like Tennessee-based Seraphim Plastics prove it every day.

Seraphim purchases scrap plastic waste from companies in seven states. They buy up plastic purge and cutoffs from injection mold operations. Other types of customers supply them with plastic pallets, dunnage trays, totes, buckets, and baled PET. Everything the company collects is sent through machinery to reduce it to pellets or chips that are packaged and sold to manufacturers.

This model works because it removes the most unprofitable aspect of residential recycling: manual labor. In a typical residential recycling facility, employees manually sort recyclable materials from unwanted trash. Even when sorting machinery is used, human operators still need to be present.

Seraphim’s process eliminates the cost of sorting. How so? The loads they pick up must already be sorted. When they arrived to pick up a load of plastic pallets, that is all they picked up. The pallets do not have to be sorted and decontaminated at their facility.

Education and Action Together

Time will tell whether Abu Dhabi’s educational campaign will pay off in the long run. If it does, citizens will be actively engaged in improving waste management. So will industrial companies. The result should be less litter and waste tied to single-use plastics.

If Abu Dhabi succeeds, they will demonstrate that education and action together can make a difference. If the effort fails, it will be back to the drawing board. They will have to find some other way to achieve better waste management.