Sustainable development can be considered as the most pressing challenges facing the developing nations, with the mandate to create a balance between their economic and social development while maintaining the environmental performance. Waste production in Qatar has grown significantly which poses a stark challenge for the country’s waste management industry. Qatar seems to produce an aggregate of 28,000 tons per day of solid waste, of which 3% is recycled, 4% is incinerated and the remaining waste is disposed into landfills. One of the motives of Qatar National Development Strategy, NDS is to increase the recycle measure to 38% of solid waste, thereby minimizing landfill to 53% and transforming waste to energy. Hence this paper offers the potential view for managing and optimizing domestic waste management that is about 25% of the total waste generated in the country. Hence a detailed methodology of ‘The Domestic Solid Waste Management (DSWMC) was also presented. It is one of the largest specialized centers in altering domestic waste in the MENA region. Different strategies of Qatar in waste management and proposals in the National Development Strategy 2011-2016 have also been mentioned. The findings have shown that DSWMC has proved to be of great help to waste management industry of Qatar which is able to treat 2300 tons of domestic waste each day, as well as 5000 tons of construction and demolition waste and thereby nearing towards sustainable development.
Keywords: Qatar, Waste Management, Methodology, Integrated solid waste treatment, Strategy
Introduction
Waste Management has become the biggest challenges that the nations need to approach in a sustainable manner, but the intensity of the challenge to developing nations is ever increasing on account of their high population and growth rate, increasing urbanization, industrial expansion and economic development. Therefore, it is essential to optimize domestic waste management processes and to update their regulations. Qatar, being the world’s fastest growing economies state’s sustainable waste management as one of the hot areas which needs serious concern. It was quite interesting to deal with such a challenging problem and to know more about the efforts taken to overcome a hot issue of concern. Qatar is said to have the highest per capita waste production rates worldwide of 1.8 kg per day, and it makes more tons of municipal solid waste each year as per the recent studies. Solid waste stream largely consists of organic materials and the remaining wastes are usually made up of recyclable such as: paper, glass, plastics, metals in which much of it is crowded into the landfills. But what happens actually is that the landfills in Qatar are running out of space and so more landfills are in need.
According to Qatar National Development 2011-2016, a multi-faceted design was said to be adopted by the country in order to carry the levels of waste produced by various households, industrial and commercial sites which also includes encouraging the development of recycling initiatives. Qatar aims to an adopt integrated waste hierarchy of prevention, reduction, reuse, recycle, recovery of energy and landfill. There are three landfills in Qatar as of now; Umm Al-Afai for huge and household waste, Rawda Rashed for construction and demolition waste, and Al-Krana for sewage wastes. But an important point to be noted is that landfill cannot be considered as an empirical resolution for a country whose land availability is very limited even though landfilling is being used as a main method of waste disposal. A comprehensive solid waste management is being enforced that will be coordinating different responsibilities, activities and planning in order to manage the wastes which comes from household ,commercial establishment and construction industry whose motive is to recycle 38% of solid waste which is currently limited to only 8% and to minimize domestic per capita waste generation. Five waste transfer stations have been set up in Qatar with advanced technology for material recovery facility. One of the gifted developments has been the contribution towards creating Domestic Solid Waste Management Centre ( DSWMC ) at Mesaieed whose motive is to increase the recovery of different materials for reuse and recovery of energy from waste with the help of advanced techniques involving: the processes for segregation , preliminary-processing, mechanical and organic recycling, and waste-to-energy and composting technologies.
The focus of this paper was to examine the efforts taken by Qatar as a nation in managing the ever-challenging problem -‘Waste Management’ by leveraging technology and associated practices. Citizen’s vital role in enhancing waste management scene in Qatar is a necessity for reducing the garbage generation and to practice source-partition in households, offices. And Qatar also needs a handful of recycling stations to address the flourishing garbage clearance issue.
Qatar on a ‘Sustainable growth path’
Countries of the Gulf region hold the unenviable status of being among the most affluent, resource-using, and consequently waste generating nations of the world in which Qatar is said to be ranked second in terms of their ecological footprints. We can know that Qatar is on its sustainable growth path by being aware of the Qatar government, which is investing in many new waste management technologies that focuses on awareness building programs to encourage recycling.
As part of its expansion programs, especially in the light of Qatar hosting mega events such as the World Cup 2022 and IAAF World Athletics Championship 2019, Qatar has disclosed numerous plans and infrastructure development projects, including a new seaport, railway system, main roads and flyovers and construction of stadiums, hotels , etc. According to Qatar Vision 2030 and World Cup 2022 targets, various plans include social infrastructure developments, education, healthcare which aims at improving Qatar’s standard of living. But along with these developments that are put forward for the improvement of the status of Qatar comes another set of challenges which needs our serious concern. Due to these mega projects and the following increase in population, it is expected for solid waste generation to rise even higher than now.
But however, there is definitely a strong point to be mentioned at this point of time which has contributed greatly to the waste management in the country. As mentioned earlier, landfill cannot be seen as a sustainable solution in economic or environment terms because of which government has introduced specific strategies to improve the waste management in the country. And that is how Domestic Solid Waste Management Centre (DSWMC) came into action which started to operate successfully in Mesaieed since 2011.
Domestic Solid Waste Management Centre
DSWMC is the most important sustainability pillar of the Qatar National Vision 2030. It is the Middle East’s first state ‘of-the-art integrated waste manage that treats domestic solid waste for Qatar which needs our sincere concernment with various facilities such as: waste sorting and recycling, a composting plant , waste-to-energy incineration plant and the discarding of nonrenewable materials in a landfill. These processes work unitedly, correlating and sustaining with one another to help in increasing energy and substance recovery .It is planned in such a manner that it is to be expanded in stages and is planned to treat up to 2300 tons of waste per day of domestic as well as commercial waste in Stage 1 in which the facility has been operating at full capacity in Stage 1 itself. Due to this, the rest of solid wastes has been ending up in the landfill. Thus, we can say that more than 95% of the waste is converted into energy and less than 5% of the materials that are taken for the process are actually diverted to a landfill.
Construction And Working
The Domestic Solid Waste Management Center was designed, build and is operated by Keppels Seghers, the Singaporean engineering firm. Initially Keppels Seghers to design the roof structure for the Green Waste Storage Building of the composting plant as a large steel framed roof with trusses. Green Waste comprises of yard and garden waste, kitchen wastes including, food leftovers and vegetable/fruit peels. These materials are sent to the composting plant initially and are eventually cut into shreds, screened and gets collected in the interior part of the Green Waste Storage facility. It is then the grab-cranes come into play by feeding the material into anaerobic digesters, which facilitate the breaking down of the wastes and thus biogas is produced. This biogas is finally converted into a form of power generation. But in order to carry out this breakdown process, Keppels Seghers wanted a construction which could extend the huge, open space of the building, without any internal support columns that can obstruct the flow of materials and waste. So Keppels decided the design of the structure to be a ‘Geometrica dome’ due to its various advantages such as: artistic beauty, cost competitive, and also scheme advantages. This dome of Qatar waste center provides all the benefits of circular domes. There were four parameters considered while defining a dome such as: the border of the dome, the height of the apex, a single meridian and the angle at which the selected meridian is taken.
The dome sits on a solid concrete perimeter in its rectangular shape and varies in elevation. It is nearly 20 meters tall over its support wall and is clad in with 3,384 pieces of painted steel epoxy, and the area needed to house the Green Waste storage and its variety of equipment covers 1,923 square meters. DSWMC composting facility is considered to be the largest composting plant in the world which has an ideal covering of Geometrica’s unique . In this way, DSWMC came to be known as the landmark of the region which is indeed a great attainment for Qatar as a nation.
New MSW plant in Al-Khor
Government has funded in a new state-of-the-art MSW plant in Al-Khor, with the need of increasing the processing facilities to reduce the municipal waste arising in Qatar. Currently, the Al-Khor sorting plant is under the construction process which is expected to start its operation in early 2016. It is the second extensive Material Recovery Facility in the country which is capable of processing about 1,500 tons of varied Municipal Solid Wastes each day on two lines. Tomra Sorting is one of the dominant technology suppliers to the plant who have contributed greatly to the formation of the Al-Khor plant. Sensor-based sorting technology has been used in the plant for the excellent recovery of beneficial waste materials. Traditional recycling processes do not allow the recovery of valuable, recycling materials that includes metals, plastics, paper and thus, sensor-based sorting technology has proved to be of great help in enabling high level of recovery rates for materials belonging to this waste stream.
Tomra’s Autosort optical sorting units will be installed that combines near infrared (NIR) and visual (VIS) sensors that have the ability to simultaneously categorize material on the basis of its material type and color which is actually incapable in conventional technology. It is expected that Al-Khor plant when operated could attain a fraction purity of up to 95 percent and recovery produces which is up to 85 percent. Both the plants as well as the associated technology have been devised comprehensively in order to boost the quality, capacity and also to minimize the need for manual labor.
Pneumatic Waste Collection (PWC) – Marafaq Qatar
PWC is a way of moving the municipal solid waste using air from buildings into a central location through a piping system which can eliminate the municipal solid waste automatically for a period of 24/7. These waste load stations are situated in every building or public area. These stations are connected to a PWC piping framework. The PWC pipes are lastly terminated in the Central Waste Plant Room.
Those waste which are thrown into the load station are temporarily stored below the feeding inlet . The PWC system will start naturally to pull and unload all waste to the central plant room when the waste level switch gets activated. In order to transport waste, there are exhaust fans to within the plant to create vacuum in the piping network .As the waste gets separated from the air stream, the exhaust air is filtered before it exhausts back to the environment. During the final stage, a compactor comes into play for compressing the waste in the container that will reduce the amount of waste and hence less municipal waste trucks will be used to gather MSW from a chief location which also lessens the traffic.
Government Strategy
The Qatar Government has played an important role in identifying the requirement for effective waste management plans. This issue has been addressed by Qatar Government in Qatar National Development Strategy 2011-2016. According to this plan, the Government suggests to contain the levels of waste produced by various households, industrial and commercial sites and to encourage recycling of much of the waste generated. The plan emphasizes on activities that could reduce the pressure on the environment accordingly, with the most desirable objective being the avoidance of waste. But however there are some wastes which cannot be avoided, so in that cases, the most favored targets would be to reduce, reuse, and recycle them and the least preferred action is the disposal of materials.
The plan also proposes to begin new policies to encourage the firms to export recycled materials and producers to use recycled items. The Government should provide subsidies in order to strengthen more and more organizations to enter the business of recycling, facilitate and encourage public awareness campaigns for raising waste separation process. It also deals to increase collection networks and recycling bins.
Public awareness and sponsored demonstrations have been planned to promote new recycling activities. Citizens are also given an opportunity to understand the usage of recycled products, for example, furniture made from recycled wood. Citizens are also given an opportunity to identify their duty in waste reduction and recycling by considering the well-being of future generations.
Government has a crucial role in establishment of solid waste management plan by organizing different responsibilities, activities and planning. The plan, to be coordinated with the Qatar National Master Plan, will cover all the households, industrial and commercial establishments and the plan will also add categorization of different types of domestic and non-domestic waste, checking their sources. On another front, various entities including government and private organizations have been mobilizing resources and encouraging people to participate in programs to handle the wastes based on the methods and principles of science. They have initiated various awareness building programs in the country to educate the citizens on various waste management and recycling issues.
Discussion – The Way Forward
When the Qatar National Development Strategy 2011-2016 was designed, the solid waste management facility plant at Mesaieed was a worthy solution, but by the end of the project completion the capacity was seem to be overwhelmed. Hence, Qatar needs a few of such centers to address the ever increasing threat of disposal problem.
The Government should aim to enact strong waste management legislation and to make widespread attention about the ‘4R’s of waste administration’ ‘ Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Recovery while considering the steps to be involved in handling the waste generated in future. If this can be accomplished, then the public can play their role to reduce the waste production and also in recycling waste by segregating waste at the origin, which in turn make the process much easier. The community needs to be made conscious of their obligation and commitment towards the future generations. Through learning and illustration, segregation-at-source may be successfully implemented throughout the country.
Being a powerful Muslim nation, the government can take an advantage of the dominant Islamic scholars in order to encourage the society to lessen per capita waste production and to take care of the depleting natural resources. Establishment of substance recovery facilities and recycling centers and improving the curbside collection technique can contribute to strengthen communal involvement in waste management proposals. Legislations have to be made mandatory to ensure compliance, failure of which will result in fine along with spot checks by the Government figure and hence, its implementation should be made strict , so that the citizens become aware about the seriousness of the issue.
Possible Solutions
- As the numbers of private companies are increasing, encouraging the private companies for engaging in waste management strategies and generating power could definitely be a good move towards sustainable development.
- Increasing public participation and awareness among Qatar population by making environmental impact of waste generation issue widely available, stressing on the importance of minimizing waste and improving quality of life.
- Sustainable waste management may be brought about through investments in education, advanced research, innovative technologies, and capacity development.
- People residing in Qatar have an immense responsibility in making use of resources in a sustainable manner and thereby, reducing the domestic waste generation. This approach of residents could play an important role in keeping their surroundings free of garbage.
- Educating people about the segregation and the recycling of waste could contribute to the waste management practices. There must be mandatory segregation at origin to be adopted by all companies and individuals. But more importantly to minimize their usages of resources in the first place.
- A long-term technique is required to separate waste at its source, which could lead to increased recycling of the waste and consequently may reduce landfill. Easy accessibility to landfills should be managed and observed by the respected authorities in order to reduce per capita waste generation.
- Recycling can be considered as one of the best option. Other methods like land refill and incineration are regarded as short-term solutions only.
- Recycling is a business that makes money. Its profit in Qatar seems to increase in its long way and the potential is huge. According to the Qatar Development Bank, the revenue potential from solid waste could be as high as QR 2.24 billion with QR 979.16 million coming from recycling household waste. Thus, government can come up with more incentives to encourage recycling industry for attaining the desired goal.
- According to the Qatar Development Bank, the revenue potential from solid waste could be as high as QR 2.24 billion with QR 979.16 million coming from recycling household waste. Thus, waste has enormous market potential and its commercial angle can also to taken into consideration to earn millions.
- An increasingly common method- concrete recycling- a way of using remains generated from redeveloping or destroying existing solid constructions. In this way, concrete can be crushed and used as gravel for new constructions instead of disposing those remains in the landfills. Thus, it reduces the need for gravel mining, keep the concrete debris out of landfills and keep construction costs down. There seem to be a lot of advantages by bringing such an initiative into action.
In order to solve this issue of serious concern, some important key features include industry-wide cooperation to ensure synergy between waste generation and the government’s legislation, society’s outlook on waste, education and commitment. The prevention of waste is a long-term objective and it requires much time and a lot of investment, hence the real goal should be is to reduce avoidable waste, and to identify those ways to use it for the benefit of our economy. There is nothing better than seeing the fruits of your labor, and in Qatar you can make a concrete, real impact compared to those countries where some systems and processes are already solidly established and bureaucratic.
Conclusion
Our ways of living are unsustainable. They have been linked with ‘over’; over-manufacturing, over-use, over-pollution, and so on. The influences of our lifestyles are putting an excessive stress on our earth and causes unfriendly or adverse environmental, economic, social and health-related consequences. As we do not change our present-day lifestyles into much more environmental friendly mode, the projected growth in economy and population and as a result of that growth, the waste and pollution will necessarily lead to environmental degradation.
Qatar, being a fastest growing economy should take more sustainable approaches in order to deal with the ever challenging problem facing the developing countries- ‘Waste management’. Qatar is at a risk of being buried under heaps of waste. Thus, sustainability need to be established with the use of new technology and continuous efforts should be taken to promote awareness which can be considered to be vital for achieving better waste management strategies. These include adopting plans such as composters; solar-powered waste compactors; glass crushers; a system that allows bottled water to be reused; and cardboard balers. These options come under the Eco- friendly footsteps. Any strategy must have different aspects, addressing procedures of handling different forms of waste such as: domestic, construction and demolition. Considering the overall program, there must be a defined strategy for each sector, as they must all be addressed in a different way. There is a need for us to consider how we can use the best technology in order to make sure that the waste becomes a resource rather than being a source of stress for the nation. We should understand the efficient usage of 3R’s- reusing, recycling, and reducing instead of sending the waste to landfill which is not a good solution. Analyzing the kinds, quantity, and origin of wastes; and recognize satisfactory collection, proper conveyance, treatment, recycling, and disposal methods; and about how to reduce the production of waste can be considered as some of the essential steps in waste management. After this, comes the need to find the technology and methodology to reduce our waste generation which can be made possible through awareness and enforcement. We need to bring out changes from different points of view as such some says that majority of the people are already aware of the need of waste management, in that case we need to change the waste culture and strengthen our messages for a good initiative.
Thus, Waste management is definitely an international challenge that needs the concern and responsibility of each and every citizen. At the heart of this issue lies responsibility and leadership; individuals, companies and organizations should take personal responsibility for the waste that they generate as a first step for finding ways to reduce, reuse and recycle it. Yes, there is a lack of recycling facilities in Qatar. Yes, government policy is lagging in some areas. But above all else there is an absence of people standing up and taking responsibility for that yucky, smelly, dirty stuff that is both a valuable resource if handled correctly and a nuisance, if not properly processed.
Qatar’s investment in facilities such as the DSWMC and Al Khor will be key to ensuring that the country has the capacity to process its waste. By encouraging waste minimization, increasing the public’s recycling efforts and investing in additional processing facilities, the Government of Qatar is taking the right approach to managing the country’s waste. However, it should also be looking to what other countries are achieving through the introduction of strict waste management legislation to truly maximize the country’s management of its solid waste.
Through our recycling initiatives, through raising awareness, and through other mentioned efforts, we will definitely be able see a remarkable improvement in waste generation and management sooner or later, perhaps sooner than later. What goes in one part of the world can have a direct or indirect impact on another, that is ,all the problems are linked to one another . Hence, an initiative to address this serious problem itself could bring much difference in all the other issues linked. The initiative for changes should start within us, extending to our family and friends and slowing expanding it to the community as a whole. Everything seems to be possible as long as the country stands united for a single goal of sustainable management. ‘A clean Qatar is indeed a collective responsibility.’
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