School students, private companies join desert clean-up

Dubai Municipality, 25 March 2022:  In celebration of Global Recycling Day, which falls on March 18 every year, Dubai Municipality, with the participation of school students and a team of private companies, organized a campaign to clean up the desert.  

A day full of educational and environmental activities, participated 150 by volunteers, were joined by teams from Dulsco and Siemens as well as students from Cambridge International School, Our Own High School-Al Warqa and Pristine Private School.

Before starting the desert clean-up session, the teams attended a workshop on waste segregation, conducted by Dulsco, which highlighted the different types of waste and methods of sorting them.

The mascot of the Dubai Municipality cleaners, 'Nazouf', joined the entertainment events organized during the campaign, supported by the recycling assistant of Dulsco, 'Birdy,' while the company's bus dedicated to collecting recyclable materials was also on site to help collect the waste. 

Nazouf and Birdy played a vital role in educating volunteers about the importance of the 4Rs of waste management – reduce, reuse, repurpose and recycle. They also helped raise awareness on the importance of recycling by contributing to the sustainability of the environment. The mascots also added an atmosphere of fun and happiness for the participating students. 

The waste collected by the participants was weighed on the site before being transported to Dulsco's material recycling facility in Dubai for further processing, and an impact assessment will be conducted later to determine the quantity of waste collected and recycled.
“Through this event, we seek to enhance the social responsibility of our students in preserving the environment and adopting sustainable practices in dealing with waste by disseminating the culture of separating waste from the source and preserving the aesthetic appearance of Dubai,” added Eng. Abdulmajeed Saifaie, Director of Waste Management Department at Dubai Municipality. 

“Global Recycling Day is an initiative by the Global Recycling Foundation, which aims to not only raise awareness on the importance of recycling, but also to highlight how recycling benefits our natural resources. The desert is the biggest ecosystem in our country and deserves to be protected as it is an important part of the local heritage and history,”  said David Stockton, CEO of Dulsco.

“We are proud to participate in this initiative to help clean up the natural habitat in the UAE. This is an example of how we all can contribute to improving our local environments and communities,” said Afzal Shabaz Mohammed, Vice President for IoT, Technology and Innovation at Siemens in the UAE.

Global Recycling Day was created in 2018 to help recognize and celebrate the importance recycling plays in preserving the world’s precious primary resources and securing the future of our planet. It is a day for the world to come together and put the planet first.