ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – There is a common misconception that there is no recycling in Iraqi Kurdistan. One need only visit the mountains of burning trash on the outskirts of the region’s fastest growing city to see the truth.
A small army of laborers brave the toxic clouds in Erbil’s metastasizing landfills, using iron rods to pick through heaps of garbage in search of scraps of any worth.
Pickups filled with wire and discarded concrete blocks file past garbage trucks bringing fresh supplies of unsorted trash. In the time that the municipality has failed to set up a comprehensive waste management system, entrepreneurs and the urban poor have created an informal recycling program of their own.
Since 2011, the municipality of Erbil announced plans to build recycling plants with various international firms, none of which has materialized thus far. Two years ago, Unicef commissioned a “Solid Waste Management Plan” for the Erbil governorate in an effort to encourage environmentally sound practices. The report acknowledged that rapid urbanization and increasing prosperity in the region -- meaning more consumption and more trash -- have created a mushrooming waste disposal crisis.
The Ministry of Municipalities and Tourism restated its intention to build two recycling plants east and west of the city, with further plans to open similar facilities nearby. It also announced that landfills are on the way.
Talk is cheap, however, for the thousands of people who live near massive dumps, where most of the waste ends up in smoke, in the water supply or blown into farms and properties.
Waste-related pollution affects everyone in the region one way or another. Burning trash pollutes the air, water, and food supply. At dumps outside the city, goats and cows are seen chomping down garbage and chemical waste.
It is not just hippies that call for smarter trash disposal. Increasingly, it is businessmen and policymakers. Environmental concerns aside, the smell of incinerated plastic keeps property values down, cripples the agricultural sector, and causes colossal health expenditures. The costs of not doing anything about this problem far outweigh the expenditure of investing in sound waste disposal practices.
Dohuk was the first city in the region to invest in recycling. It hired Eggersman, a German firm, to build a facility that separates trash into materials that can be recycled, composted, or buried. It has been operating since 2010, processing 350-500 tons of waste a day. The project was so successful the city commissioned another Eggersman facility, nearly completed, that will process an additional 500 tons a day.
This May, Akre will open a similar facility to compliment Iraqi Kurdistan’s first “European-standard landfill,” as branded by the management at MRF, the Dohuk-based company operating both projects. MRF has prepared for the launch by organizing community clean-up events, recycling education, and a youth-oriented advertisement campaign. The firm runs a series of educational ads on a children’s network, hoping to forge a new generation of ecofriendly citizens.
In Sulaimani, international cement titan Lafarge and Faruk Group Holding recently broke ground on Ecocem, a new waste management plant capable of processing 1,000-1,500 tons of trash a day. The private firms are happy to fork out the $70 million investment costs, because a portion of the unrecyclable trash will be burned (at no cost to the environment) in order to produce energy for Lafarge’s cement factory next door.
The Ministry of Natural Resources has encouraged oil and gas companies to recycle as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. Many firms hire TOIFOR, a logistics company, to hold recycling seminars, provide bins and deliver waste to small recycling facilities in the region.
Adam Nemeth, TOIFOR’s Kurdistan manager, has seen lots of new business in the last year-and-half, as commercial recycling becomes more popular. More and more local firms are signing up, although the majority of firms are foreign. According to him, getting employees to recycle is the biggest obstacle.
“It’s hard to explain to people why they have to put their bottle in one bin, paper in another and their hamburger in a third,” he says. “We put labels in Kurdish, Arabic, English, even an illustrative picture, but people still mix the trash.”
This is problematic, because if more than five percent of any category is contaminated, the entire collection heads to the landfill.
“If recycling programs are started, they have to be done well to be of any use,“ Nemeth warns. This means it should be easy and convenient. Bins need to be placed close to employees, or else they will not use them. Then they must be collected on time, or else people will abandon the effort. “Unfortunately, discouraging people from recycling is easier than encouraging them,” he says with a sigh.
Building a full-fledged recycling industry will take time. The region’s current facilities are only able to process a fraction of the 12,000-13,000 tons of trash the government estimates are generated every day. Huge sections of the “recycling chain” -- the steps between collection and reuse -- are still absent. Once collected and processed, a lot of materials are actually recycled abroad. For example, any plastic bottles that make it into TOIFOR’s bins are broken down and sold to a Turkish firm for reuse.
Slowly but surely, small Kurdish recycling firms are emerging. Royal Oscar converts used paper into egg cartons, and other firms recycle engine oil or metals. TOIFOR simply gives raw materials to these small firms, who are still too little to afford to buy them.
Despite all their efforts, private firms concede that only municipalities operate at the scale necessary to offset massive environmental and social costs.
“The majority of waste is coming from cities,” Nemeth says. “If they can practice segregated waste management, it would make all the difference.” Because of the cost of investing in plants, he advises starting with small cities, as in the case of Dohuk or Akre.
“The smaller the city is, the easier the project is to execute. Even in Europe, recycling usually begins in certain districts of a large city. You need to start somewhere to get the ball rolling.”
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