Campaign to collect bottles

Dubai: Companies with more than 200 employees are being urged to send plastic bottles accumulated at their premises to Masafi company for recycling.

The bottles will be collected by Masafi collection centres and sent to Fujairah for recycling into non-food plastic items.

The corporate recycling service aims to reduce the environmental impact of plastic bottles. The service is part of Masafi's Carbon Action Plan - an initiative to reduce the carbon footprint in the UAE launched by the company in July 2008.

The company has already collected approximately 300 metric tonnes of plastic for recycling purposes since the launch of the action plan. The plan is aimed at reducing the amount of carbon emissions from its manufacturing unit, product offerings, systems as well as services and becoming a total environment-friendly organisation.

Previously plastic bottles were sent to China to be recycled, said Natascha Edelmann, Head of Marketing of Masafi. "The collected plastic bottles will now be sent for recycling to a Fujairah-based company ... Previously, we used to sell the pre-processed plastic to municipality-approved ISO certified dealers who later exported the same to Chinese manufacturers. By recycling the plastic in the UAE, we have further reduced the carbon footprint as the plastic need not be transported by liners to China."

An Environmental Executive will be deployed to visit the various schools and centres where the company has already installed recycling bins. Masafi has also joined the UN Global Compact, the world's largest voluntary corporate citizenship initiative.

"Masafi will take the responsibility of collecting used plastic bottles at the participating companies with the help of our very own Environmental Executive. The companies need not be Masafi customers to be partners in this initiative," she added.

Masafi adopted the Carbon Action Plan to measure and reduce the carbon emissions and move towards a carbon negative environment.

The company launched the Brown Carton Box - a new packaging concept, which significantly reduced the amount of corrugated carton used. Masafi also installed energy-efficient non-CFC chillers at its bottling plant in Ras Al Khaimah as a major step towards safeguarding the environment.