Abu Dhabi plans to curb the use of landfill sites by 80 per cent in five years, as part of a high-tech transformation of its waste centres.
The emirate will close its existing sites and replace them with underground structures designed to protect soil and groundwater, capture landfill gases and minimise environmental impact.
The new engineered landfills will form part of two integrated eco parks, one at Al Bihouth in Al Dhafra and another in Al Ain, designed to ensure only the small amount of waste that cannot be recycled or recovered is buried.
The initiative is being led by Etienne Petit, 59, the French chief executive of Tadweer Group.
“The best way to achieve 80 per cent diversion from landfill is to close landfill,” Mr Petit told The National.
Abu Dhabi has 11 legacy dumpsites and landfill sites, three of which have already been closed. Some of the sites have grown into towering mountains of waste, with one at Al Bihouth reaching about 90m high.
“Today, the landfills are mountains,” Mr Petit said, adding that under the new scheme, “you will see nothing. It will be underground".
The arrangement will reduce lorry movements and lower fuel consumption and carbon emissions, while allowing material recovered at one centre to move directly to the next, creating what he described as “a valuable circulation of waste”.
“Instead of having a plant there and there and there, we will bundle them in the same location,” Mr Petit said.
Converting waste to energy
At the heart of the first eco-park will be Abu Dhabi’s waste-to-energy plant, a project worth close to Dh1 billion that will process about half of the city's mixed municipal waste before converting it into electricity for the national grid.
Supporting it will be a new 400,000 tonne Material Recovery Facility (MRF) in Al Bihouth, while a second is being developed in Al Ain.
An MRF is a highly automated sorting plant that separates recyclable materials from mixed household waste before the remaining material is sent for energy recovery.
“The MRF will not be the MRF we had in Europe 20 years ago,” Mr Petit said. “There is unbelievable treatment capacity. You have lasers that identify recyclable material in milliseconds.”
The eco-parks are intended to challenge public perceptions of waste centres.
They will be surrounded by palm trees and landscaping, with gardens, biodiversity projects and bee stations developed in partnership with Silal. Compost produced from organic waste could eventually be returned to farms, creating a circular agricultural system.
“You will not have the impression that you are entering a waste eco park,” Mr Petit said.
“At the entrance we will have gardens. We will have biodiversity. We will have bee houses.”
Mr Petit said bee houses had become a feature of many of his previous centres in Germany.
“People came to see the bees,” he said. “They participated in the ecosystem around the workplace. You go into a house in Germany and there are seven bins.”
Clean materials recovered by the plant will be sold into recycling markets, while the remaining waste will move directly to the waste-to-energy plant.
“Garbage in, garbage out,” Mr Petit said. “If you have good segregation at source, you will have the best recycled material and the best material to treat.”
Mr Petit said the company would eventually recover between 15 and 20 per cent of incoming waste as clean recyclable material.
“The road to the top is not easy,” he said. “But there is the ambition, there is the mandate and there is the technology.”
The transformation begins long before waste reaches the treatment plants.
Through its collection company, Tajmee’e, Tadweer expects to collect about 70 per cent of Abu Dhabi’s municipal waste by the end of the year. Its fleet will grow from about 100 lorries today to almost 300 by the end of the year.
“We will have the most modern fleet in the GCC,” Mr Petit said.
A segregation pilot will begin in Shakhbout City in September, using two-bin collection systems, while new drop-off centres will allow residents to dispose of bulky items and garden waste.
Ultimately, Tadweer hopes households will separate waste at source before collection, although Mr Petit acknowledged this would require a significant shift in attitudes. While packaging waste is increasing as consumer habits change, food waste remains one of the largest household waste streams.
“That is a cultural change,” he said. “The best waste is the waste which is not produced. If you consider that waste is potentially a resource, you will take care.”
Mr Petit also explained that recovering materials locally will reduce dependence on imported raw materials, strengthen national resilience and help create a more sustainable economy.
“If we are not wasting things, we are not obliged to buy from abroad,” he said. “We are more resilient and more sustainable.
“I’m not working for me,” he said. “I’m working for my kids and your kids. Within a generation, they will not see waste as we are seeing now.”
“I’m not building something for me. I’m building something for the country. I’m building it for your child.”
