Most of us here in Dubai have probably heard of recycling, but single stream recycling? Well, it simply refers to putting all types of recyclable materials together and let a private company handle the segregating bit.
Research shows that recycling has worked better in towns and cities abroad like in the United States when single channel recycling was introduced. No longer did people have to take the trouble to segregate different types of recyclable items and separate the trash that they were trying to get rid off on a daily basis. It became a success because there was little effort required in segregating garbage from the recyclable items and that people would quickly adapt to it; whereas normally they would dump garbage altogether and avoid the original complex recycling process as a whole.
Single stream recycling can also save money because companies that handle such recyclable items pay for those items. The government thus, no longer needs to pay landfills to get rid of such garbage.
How does this help the environment? Well, it simply speeds up the whole process because everyone at every level of the hierarchy is co-operating and when this happens, the right recyclable items get channelled onto the right path eventually reaching the manufacturers on time.
If an aluminium can reaches a scrap metal recycler in Dubai on time, it prevents the need for manufacturers to purchase virgin materials to keep their production numbers up and running. In a similar way the quicker the different types of ferrous metal scrap lands up at scrap dealers in Dubai, the lesser will be the requirement for newer and rarer earth metals across different industries.
Single stream recycling not only encourages recycling, but clears up the bottlenecks in the recycling process.
