Ceramic tiles enter into GGC’s recycling equation

Cairo - Two UAE-based companies, Bee’ah and Seramic Materials Ltd., announced their signing of a MoU during the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week 2020.

Bee’ah is a long established integrated environmental, recycling and waste management company. Seramic Materials is a startup with its own patented waste integration technology for recycling industrial solid waste into sustainable and affordable value-added ceramic products.

The strategic partnership between the two firms is meant to utilise ashes from municipal solid waste incinerators (MSWI) produced at Bee’ah’s waste-to-energy plant. This ash will be recycled by Seramic Materials into sustainable, affordable, and durable construction materials. This is part of the UAE’s circular economy strategy, meant to fulfil its zero-waste-to-landfills target.

Khaled Al Huraimel, Group CEO of Bee’ah, was quoted as saying that: “Bee’ah believes that collaboration and co-creation with partners can help solve some of the region’s greatest environmental challenges – in this case, that is closing the loop for waste management. By adopting a holistic approach to sustainability, we are leading the charge in the UAE towards a truly zero-waste solution and a circular economy, in which we reinvent and innovate new products made by waste.”

For his the CEO of Seramic Materials Dr. Nicolas Calvet explained further that: “Once the two UAE incinerators are operational, MSWI ash will rapidly become a major mineral waste in the UAE by quantity produced with about 800,000 tons per year, ranking MSWI ash as third just after demolition concrete and alumina red mud.
By collaborating with Bee’ah now, we are anticipating and providing viable solutions for this foreseeable waste management issue. As soon as the waste-to-energy plant begins to generate ash, Seramic Materials will be ready to transform it into valuable products. This partnership demonstrates visionary leadership of the UAE and the Group CEO of Bee’ah. The solution developed for EWTE is applicable all over the world.”

EWTE is the Emirates Waste to Energy company. EWTE’s first project is the Sharjah, Waste to Energy plant, a facility belonging to the Emirates Waste to Energy Company, a joint venture between Bee’ah and Masdar. Seramic Materials, while a new business force in the UAE, has worked with

The Catalyst, a Masdar-BP initiative, to build a laboratory at The Tech Park in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi. This is first laboratory of its kind in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) dedicated to transforming and up-cycling locally produced industrial solid waste into value-added products.

EWTE’s new plant in Sharjah is meant to rescue 300,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste from landfill sites, annually, part of Sharjah’s own efforts to become a zero-waste city by the target date of 2021. The waste itself is also being used to produce electricity by heating a turbine that generates up to 30MW of electricity used by up to 28,000 homes. The waste material, once burned, leaves behind a combustion residue consisting of bottom ash at 25% and fly ash at roughly 2.5%. These two forms of ash will then be used by Seramic Materials to manufacture a new line of ceramic products.

Dr. Nicolas Calvet is also co-founder of Seramic Materials and an assistant professor at the Masdar Institute, Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi.