Saturday, Jul 28, 2012
Ajman: Only days after flipping the switch on a new composting machine, overseers of a hotel report they are diverting up to 600 kilograms of organic waste a day away from the local landfill.
Add into the mix new parallel recycling efforts at the hotel that are segregating a further 300 kilograms of paper, plastics and metal waste generated daily at the 400-room hotel and, over the course of the next year, as much as 328,000 kilograms of waste is expected to be diverted from the dump, said hotel management.
“This is a huge amount of waste to be diverted,” Iftikhar Hamdani, general manager, Ramada Hotel and Suites in Ajman, told Gulf News. “All of our organic waste is going into our new composting machine we have installed.”
Hamdani said the efforts, dubbed the Zero Landfill Project, are believed to be the first ever undertaken within the hotel industry in the UAE on this scale and it is hoped that other hotels across the country will follow the lead of Ramada Hotel & Suites Ajman.
“We are pioneers in the UAE; no other hotel has such a thing,” Hamdani said. “We want people to follow us on this. We are ready to give expertise to any hotel if they want to come and learn how to take these steps.”
Hamdani lauded fellow partners in the Zero Landfill Project who helped make the initiative a reality.
Within the last year, Ramada teamed up with AIMS Environment waste company as well as Green Mountain Waste Management and purchased the new composting machine from Green Good Eco-Tech.
The results demonstrated by the new composting machine are encouraging, Hamdani said.
Every day, up to 600 kilograms of organic waste — mostly from the hotel kitchen — are being fed into the composter and within 24 hours of exposure to a heat process, the waste is reduced to 120 kilograms of new compost materials that can be used to fertilise gardens and green belts.
So far, compost generated is being used on the Ramada grounds in Ajman, recycled back into the earth to provide badly-needed nutrients in a desert environment. Some of the compost is also being provided to the Ajman palace.
“Our compost system is reducing waste to 20 per cent and it can be reused on our grounds so it not only frees up land in the landfill but is being recycled,” Hamdani said.
By Derek Baldwin Chief Reporter
Gulf News 2012. All rights reserved.
