Kuwait Municipality Chairman Osama Al-Otaibi said Wednesday that recycling waste could contribute to conserving energy and resources, in addition to diversifying sources of income in Kuwait. Al-Otaibi made his remarks to reporters on the sidelines of a workshop organized by the Municipality’s Environmental Affairs Committee, titled ‘Encouraging recycling industry in Kuwait’.
The workshop aims at reaching out to the private sector in the country to understand the problems it faces with recycling, Al-Otaibi said. The municipality’s members would benefit from such a seminar by acquiring information from experts in the field, he noted, and added that they would also gain real statistics on the subject that will assist them with making strategies and regulations.
Furthermore, Al-Otaibi indicated the workshop highlights several issues and challenges facing the recycling field, notably land shortage, bureaucracy, and imposed observations by inexperienced individuals in the field. For her part, Environmental Affairs Committee’s Chairperson Eng. Maha Al-Baghli said Kuwait deals with wastes by either landfilling or burning them, noting some neighboring countries have tested recycling wastes and succeeded in it.
In the last 10 years, UAE’s Sharjah Emirate has burnt its wastes entirely, Al-Baghli stated that it has, however, succeeded recently in recycling about 75 percent of them, with the rest 25 percent being landfilled. “There are several recycling factories in Kuwait. Thus, we asked their owners to provide us with their opinions and information in order to help us evaluate the volume of waste and their sources, and so learn of the challenges facing this industry,” she said.
