Sharjah: Continuing to spread the culture of recycling in Sharjah, Bee’ah, the environmental company, started operating its new facility for the shredding and recycling of automobiles and bulk material on Wednesday.
Located at the company’s waste management centre in Al Saja’a, the facility, which is the first of its kind in the UAE, includes machines that have a capacity for shredding between 70 and 100 tonnes per hour. Daker Al Rabaya, Director of Waste at Bee’ah, said at a press briefing that the ‘unstoppable’ machines can shred up to 60 cars per hour as an average-sized car takes around 50 to 70 seconds to be fully destroyed. The cars being recycled are brought into Bee’ah’s facilities by Sharjah Municipality, Sharjah Police, and other companies. Many of the cars are also brought in after being abandoned for long periods of time, and others are imported from other countries.
Recycling process
The cars are first manually dismantled, where the engines, glass, plastic and metal parts are separated before being recycled. Depending on their condition, the cars’ engines, mechanical car parts, and glass are resold, while the car’s metal parts, along with its plastic parts, are dropped into the machine for shredding. “After the shredding process, the machine takes the waste material through a metal detector which separates the material into two streams that are sorted to ensure that the detector did not miss anything,” explained Al Rabaya.
Operated by remote control, the machine finally separates the waste material into three by-products — aluminium, steel and plastic. The by-products are then resold or sent to different factories for reuse. The new facility, which also recycles furniture and any other bulky material, aims to encourage the public to recycle all their waste material, from old appliances to house equipment, regardless of its size. “When you look at the quantity of wires, electronic waste and furniture we remove from the streets, you can understand the magnitude of the problem.”
As a part of the new recycling initiative, Al Rabaya also announced that Bee’ah has signed an MoU with an international company to refurbish and reuse car parts that are not sent for shredding. The company’s name has not been disclosed yet, as the implementation phase is still under process. Bee’ah plans to build the equipment needed for reusing car parts at its new facility located at its waste management centre, added Al Rabaya.
