ENVIRONMENTALISTS may soon be able to go green by placing their recyclable rubbish in blue bins.
The Southern Municipal Council wants to introduce them alongside normal street bins, following a proposal presented by its chairman Abdulla Abdullatif and approved unanimously by all 10 members.
“We believe the move would significantly reduce the amount of waste being taken to landfill and will further raise awareness in the community about recycling reusable material,” said Mr Abdullatif.
“The two-colour system will help direct people and make the waste segregation process simple and cost-effective for everyone involved.”
Mr Abdullatif is confident the move would save thousands of tonnes of paper, metal, plastic and glass from being dumped in the overflowing landfill site in Hafeera.
The proposal will be now reviewed by Municipalities Affairs and Agriculture Minister Wael Al Mubarak, who has the power to reject the move, approve with limited implementation, or roll it out across Bahrain’s four governorates.
Hafeera councillor Ali Al Shaikh believes the suggestion could help make Bahrain a cleaner, greener country and fit into a comprehensive environmental action plan set to be drawn up by the government by September.
“There are some companies specialising in recycling paper or glass but the rest mostly gets left unattended for expatriate trash divers to try and sift through.
“It would be far better to have a two-colour bin system available in the street, blue for recyclable materials as proposed.
“Then we need to tackle the issue of increasing recycling facilities to meet the demand.”
The GDN reported in July last year that Bahrain’s ageing landfill site in Hafeera could be offered to a private company through an international tender to help turn waste into energy.
Capital Trustees Board technical committee chairman Mubarak Al Nuaimi, who proposed the move, believes pioneering technology combined with technological experience could form part of an urgent action plan necessitated by the site’s life span scheduled to only last until 2025.
He said neighbouring Gulf states had already launched waste-to-energy solutions and they could perhaps be adopted and adapted.
The GDN reported in May 2022 that a number of locations for recycling have been identified in a new plan to revamp the Hafeera landfill site.
Former minister Essam Khalaf told the Southern Municipal Council at the time that a comprehensive plan for the area was in its final consultative stage between the Urban Planning and Development Authority and the Supreme Council for the Environment (SCE).
He added that once the necessary details were complete and approvals issued, the recycling projects could be open to private investors.
The proposal for a specific e-waste unit was also presented by Parliament public utilities and environment affairs committee chairman and Hafeera MP Bader Al Tamimi, the council’s former chairman.
It came because tonnes of e-waste had piled up in Hafeera such as mobile phones, computers, printers, TVs and kitchen appliances.
Mr Khalaf said a specialised company had been authorised in 2020 to recycle e-waste but a full-fledged factory would help the country tackle the scourge sooner.
Bahrain has already initiated 29 ‘rapid action’ plans, 90 short-term projects, 27 medium-term policies and 34 long-term strategies to manage the country’s waste.
The landfill site now stretches to 2.83km with around 1.8 million tonnes of waste being dumped in Hafeera annually.
Mr Khalaf had also indicated that a green-waste recycling plant could be set up by 2040 with the aim of recycling 52 per cent of all general waste. The former minister said a blueprint for bio-waste management and recycling of electronics and batteries would also be drawn up in future.
Another proposal by the same council presented earlier this year was to distribute colour-coded rubbish bags to promote recycling.
The council proposed at the time that the bags could be made up of recyclable rubbish.
In 2017, Parliament dropped an entire chapter on recycling from the Cleanliness Law. It would have seen punishments imposed for failure to sort waste, but MPs said at the time that people first needed to familiarise themselves with the concept before regulating the practice. One of the omitted articles stated that those who do not separate recyclable waste would be penalised by law.
mohammed@gdnmedia.bh
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