Al Ain Mineral Water Company, one of the UAE’s leading water companies, has launched a major initiative aimed at reducing PET waste in the country.
The company, a subsidiary of Emirates Foodstuff and Mineral Water Company (Agthia) is one of two leading water brands in the UAE.
To spread the message of ‘reduce, reuse and recycle,’ the company installed a bottle shrinking device at the recent Al Ain Aerobatics Show. The device reduces the size of a PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottle by 80-90 per cent.
“This initiative was aimed at educating the general public on the need to recycle PET bottles in the UAE, and particularly to reduce the huge quantity of PET waste emerging out of large-scale events such as these,” said Fasahat Beg, general manager of Al Ain Mineral Water.
“The project evoked a lot of interest and we were able to recover and re-cycle a large proportion of the bottles used during the course of the show,” he said.
The Al Ain Aerobatic Show was chosen as a venue to launch the ‘Shrink-A-Bottle’ campaign as, according to Beg, it offered a unique, community-driven platform with a wide reach and huge visitor interest.
The company launched a pilot scheme in 10 schools across Al Ain at the beginning of the academic year in September. Under the scheme pupils are shrinking between 40,000 to 50,000 bottles a month.
The programme has been adapted from a similar programme currently being run in 500 schools in Hungary where students recycled five to six thousand tonnes of PET in 2008.
“Our intention is to roll-out the programme nationwide in schools by 2010. We would also be targeting at least 25 per cent of the hotels during the period,” says Beg.
The company has a market share of 24 per cent in the UAE and over 40 per cent in Al Ain and Abu Dhabi city. It produces 35,000 PET cups and bottles of water per hour. The UAE uses around 80,000 tonnes of PET every year and one tonne of it is enough to manufacture 40,000 bottles.
“PET recycling is an issue in this country and we are a leading producer of PET bottles in this market,” said Beg, explaining why the company chose to launch the scheme.
“Our intention is to communicate the need to recycle PET since per capita consumption of water in the UAE is among the highest in the world and the number of PET bottles produced here is massive and we would like to reduce this by at least 10-15 per cent and the best way to do this is in conjunction with schools.
“We have partnered with Fujairah-based Horizon Technologies FZE (HTF) for recycling PET. HTF has a state-of-the-art PET recycling facility, the first in the GCC, with an annual capacity to recycle 20,000 tonnes of post-consumer PET bottles (PCPB),” says Beg. Horizon is running a similar programme in some schools in Fujairah.
Sales were around Dh140 million ($38.1 million) in 2008. The company will soon begin manufacturing and distributing the children’s fruit juice Capri-Sun at its new factory in Al Ain.