Waste paper crunch hampers UAE's lone recycling mill

Your waste paper can be recycled into cardboard in just one hour. However so few people are handing in their paper to be recycled that the UAE's only paper mill has to either buy from traders or watch it being shipped for recycling abroad. Other recycling facilities around the city are set up by traders or waste companies that sell the cardboard to be recycled overseas, increasing its carbon footprint. With the technology available to recycle waste from the UAE in the UAE, there is no need to send valuable materials somewhere else, said Huzaifa Rangwala, from Union Paper Mills (UPM), the only paper recycling mill in the UAE. Since 1987 the Dubai-based mill has been turning cardboard and paper to pulp to give it a new lease of life as much-needed cardboard for packaging companies. There is not enough demand to recycle the pulp into paper, said Rangwala. Article continues below Segregation Segregating paper and cardboard from other types of rubbish, especially liquids and food, is important to make sure efforts to separate your garbage are not wasted. Usually dirty paper will end up in a landfill because it costs too much to clean. Just one quarter of the volume UPM can recycle is picked up from their recycling centres across the city. "Our capacity is 410 tonnes per day. To produce that we need 450 tonnes per day. "If we cannot meet our demand we have to buy in bulk from traders who usually export it to recyclers abroad," said Rangwala. UPM buys one tonne of cardboard for approximately Dh600. "There is plenty of waste here. We could set up two or three more factories if it wasn't being shipped away," he said. "We should be exporting a product to encourage local business rather than exporting the raw material to have cardboard made elsewhere." UPM's plant in Al Quoz uses a technology that does not cut up the cardboard in the pulping process in order to protect its fibres and its strength, said John Vijayan, plant foreman. According to Rangwala, segregating waste paper and cardboard can bring down the cost for businesses as UPM picks up the material for free.