Jordan Environment Watch : Waste management: Yemen’s quiet revolution

Yemen Observer

By Ali Marmaduke

Garbage collection is something that is generally noticed by the public only when it is not done well. Streets strewn with bottles, bags, and orange peels are visible evidence of a flawed system. But when our waste is disposed of efficiently and smartly, few think to comment. Recently, there has been a quiet revolution in solid waste collection in Sana’a that surely deserves to be noted and lauded.

Solid waste management is an increasingly common concern among cities in the developing world, and as urban populations grow and city boundaries expand, solid waste collection and disposal becomes an increasingly arduous and expensive task. “Allah created the Earth and all things on it in an accurate, well-balanced system so life would continue,” said Yahya Mohammed al-A’aqel, founder of Sana’a’s largest recycling company, the Yemen Zenat Corp. “Humans have misbehaved and misused these systems by exploiting resources without considering the limits of these resources or looking into the negative effects that result from accumulating garbage.

The result is the disturbance of environmental equilibrium.” Yet many in Sana’a have been working to restore some modicum of equilibrium, with much success. A sophisticated collection system for solid waste has been developed, as well as a multipart recycling system to serve Sana’a’s population of 1.8 million residents. Visitors often note that the old city of Sana’a is nearly spotless. Men in orange and women in blue constantly roam the streets with a broom and dustpan in hand, and residents need only place their household trash in bags on the street for it to be collected twice a week. The cobblestones literally shine.

But about seven years ago, Sana’a resembled some of the more impoverished cities in Yemen—colored plastic bags formed tidal waves in the wind, offal rotted in the gutters of neighborhood streets, and vermin populations exploded under heaps of exposed trash all over the city. But all of that changed in 1999, when municipal legislation was passed establishing the Municipal Cleansing Fund. The new law was instated as a result of a massive increase in solid waste that caused a municipal crisis. A year later, the city began to shed its outer layer of rubbish. The Cleansing Law was written with the understanding that decentralization, cost recovery and allowing municipalities to contract with the private sector would ensure success.

Those three strategies were critical for the success of Yemen’s solid waste management. It allowed the local governments to charge citizens indirectly for the collection of garbage through taxing all products imported to cities. Those indirect taxes are not transferred to the central government—they remain in the control of the municipality. That revenue generation increased the budget allocated for cleansing ten-fold. It also resulted in an increase in employment from 700 to 3,600 within a span of five or six years.

Now, around 1,500 tons of garbage collected from residential areas and industrial sites around Sana’a is dumped into the city’s landfill on Amran Road every day. The 88,000 square meter area was designated by the municipal government to be a dumpsite in the late 1970’s, but it has become a small mountain of solid waste since the Municipal Cleansing Fund was established and a monthly budget of YR 95 million was allocated for solid waste collection and disposal.

“The Cleansing Fund is responsible for the overall beautification of the city, which includes maintaining public gardens, street lamps and pedestrian paths,” said Jamal Abdul-Rahman Jaheish, director of the Sana’a General Department of Cleansing. “We have additional support of around YR 50 million per month from the central government for the administration of those things, which are not part of solid waste management,” he said. Jaheish worked as an engineer in the Department of Environmental Health for seven years until 2000, when he began working in solid waste management.

He worked as the general manager of five different waste collection districts in Sana’a before becoming general manager of the Department of Cleansing. Jaheish works at a desk in the Department of Cleansing on Sitteen Rd., the nighttime parking lot for around 300 garbage collection trucks. His job is to monitor and evaluate the performances of the decentralized system of waste collection of the 15 garbage collection departments. Each district is responsible for its own collection and disposal of solid wastes.

“Seventy percent of our monthly solid waste management budget goes toward paying our employees’ salaries and the rest is used for operational expenses, like buying petrol to run compactor machines and garbage trucks, and training workshops for employees,” Jaheish said. About 3,600 laborers are employed at the 15 cleansing departments in Sana’a. The departments are all under the auspices of the municipal government, which has divided Sana’a into 10 separate waste collection districts. Some districts have more than one department because of their high populations.

“Our employees are paid on a month-to-month basis because there is such a high rate of staff turnover,” Jaheish said. “We can’t give them contracts because they often work seasonally.” A year ago, waste management laborers at the General Department of Cleansing received a monthly salary of YR 11,000, but in Sept. 2006 the central government granted a one-month bonus to all permanent government employees.

The seasonal waste laborers, who are not considered permanent employees because of their high turnover rate, did not qualify for the bonus and the union of waste laborers organized a two-day strike. After six years of efficient garbage collection in Sana’a, the public could no longer accept heaps of trash accumulating in the streets and they demanded the strike be resolved. The government responded by granting the seasonal laborers the one-month bonus. Waste collection employees now receive YR 15,000 per month.

“There is still a lack of funds available to pay our employees better, and if the Cleansing Fund were to be increased by the municipal government, we would pay our laborers more,” Jaheish said. All of the 15 departments of cleansing in Sana’a are public, non-profit organizations. They do everything they can to increase the volume of trash collection and reduce the amount of time and money spent. “We have two transfer stations where collection trucks with a 3-5 ton carrying capacity can dump the waste they collect on routes, then the trash is moved into trucks with an 18-24 ton carrying capacity that compact the waste and take it to the landfill,” Jaheish said.

“The transfer stations save gasoline and time for collectors.” On an average day, 160 smaller trucks dump their contents into each transfer station inside the city and five larger trucks move that waste to the landfill about 25 kilometers from the center of Sana’a. But one of the transfer stations was designed with areas that the large trucks cannot enter, so it is no longer in use.

The dependence on one transfer station costs time and money, but the government does not own enough land in Sana’a to provide the Cleansing Department with land to make more stations. Lutf Mohammed al-A’aqel is the general manager and owner of the Yemen Zenat Trading Corp., a private recycling company. His head office is literally a stone’s throw from the landfill on Amran Road.

The Yemen Zenat Corp. was established at the landfill in Sana’a in 2000 to filter through waste collected around the city. “We have 200 employees who go through the solid waste collected by garbage trucks, separating paper like newspapers and text books, cardboard boxes, aluminum products, plastic water bottles, plastic bags and other things,” said al-A’aqel.

“We compact each product and sell them to India, China, Lebanon, Greece, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, where they are recycled and turned into other functional products. The bottles we export to China are made into clothes and the plastic bags we export to Saudi Arabia are made into PVC piping. We also collect and export metal from automobiles” The Yemen Zenat Corp.’s recycling program is privately owned and operated, but the municipal government supports it by directing their waste collection trucks to take their contents to the separation site before dumping it into the landfill.

In 2004, the Yemen Zenat Corp. exported about 9,720 tons of cardboard, 4,320 tons of paper, 3,960 tons of plastic, and 2,520 tons of metal to countries around the world. They estimate their exports have increased by 20 percent since then because of an increase in recycling efforts. The corporation also recently established similar branches in Aden and Mukalla. “The problem of protecting and preserving the environment has become one of the most important challenges of this time,” said Yahya Mohammed al-A’aqel, Lutf’s brother and the chief of administration at the Yemen Zenat Corp.

It is a challenge that is facing developing countries as well as advanced countries. We are trying to reduce the amount of non-biodegradable solid waste that accumulates in landfills and increase the amount of waste that can be used in the landfill as organic fertilizers. The company has increased employment and environmental benefits, and brings foreign currency to Yemen. It has garnered much international praise and support. The German embassy in Sana’a separates its garbage for the Yemen Zenat Corp. and provides the company’s employees with work clothes.

Saleh al-Sirahee, the manager of Sana’a’s landfill, works closely with the Yemen Zenat Corp. He said that recycling reduces the amount of garbage to be dumped in the landfill. The recycling process occurs during the entire process of solid waste collection. There are five phases of filtration and recycling before waste is really considered unusable and is dumped in the landfill.   The first step occurs when people in residential areas put out their bags of trash to be collected by trucks.

Poor people often rummage through the bags to find reusable items like clothes and food before the bags are collected by garbage trucks. Once the employees of the Cleansing Department collect the bags, they separate recyclable plastics, papers and metals, as well as items that they can sell, like clothes and furniture. Before taking the recyclables to the Yemen Zenat Corp., garbage truck drivers offer the clothes, books, mechanical items, toys, and furniture to private entrepreneurs who buy the things they can resell at street markets or to retail stores. Ultimately, the items they cannot sell are taken to the landfill where scavengers search for sellable or usable items.

Abdo Mohammad is an entrepreneur who waits for garbage collection trucks to stop at his stand before continuing on a few meters to the Yemen Zenat Corp. site and the landfill. “I buy about one ton of stuff every day from garbage trucks. Mostly clothes, plastics, and metals, but I also get some recyclable things that I sell to the Yemen Zenat Corp. and three of their competitors,” he said. Ultimately, though, there are few alternatives, and most of the garbage collected around the city meets the fate of all wastes that are of no further value.

The paper waste ends up shredded and the plastic and metal waste end up compacted and it is all spread into the landfill where it is covered with layers of soil to decompose or rest forever. The disposal of solid waste in landfills that are covered with soil is generally considered to be an economical and environmentally viable solution. One strategic question for the future of Yemen’s waste management is how to expand the success of the Cleansing Law and the Cleansing Fund into rural districts.

There is a workshop sponsored by GTZ (German Corporation for Technical Cooperation) with the Ministry of Local Administration on improving the strategies of solid waste collection and disposal. Such workshops are necessary to assist rural districts in improving solid waste management.  With continued effort, someday perhaps all the streets of the country will be cleansed of the modern epidemic of plastic bags, bottles, and other evidence of careless development.