Tadweer: improving municipal solid waste sustainability practices

In June 2019, Dr Salem Alkabi, Chief executive office (CEO) of Tadweer, the Abu Dhabi center of waste management (CWM), was in a thoughtful mood. He had called together his top management team, responsible for various departments including strategy, operations, projects and licensing, to discuss Tadweer’s future direction and strategy for mismanagement of solid waste, and particularly dumping into landfills in Abu Dhabi. Those attending the meeting included Abdulrahman Albloushi, the executive director of strategy and business development, Ibrahim Alali, projects and facilities manager and Hussain Alamoodi, licensing and tariff manager. Abu Dhabi CWM, known as Tadweer, is a governmental entity under the Abu Dhabi Executive Council. Tadweer is responsible for managing every aspect of municipal solid waste (MSW), including collecting, transferring, segregating, treating, recycling, reusing and tracking. Its main challenge is the issue of dumping into the landfill (Oxford Business Group, 2019). Mr Abdulrahman Albloushi, executive director of strategy and business development at Tadweer, had suggested to Alkabi that Tadweer could improve its waste management practices, making it more sustainable. In particular, the center could get more benefit from waste through reuse and recycling, instead of losing it to landfill. However, there were some difficult questions to address, particularly how effective it is to collect waste from where it is generated and move it out of sight. Alkabi also wanted to evaluate the possible business scenarios that could help Tadweer to scale up operations and had begun to think about some new strategic waste management approaches that would assure the successful operations and management of Tadweer in Abu Dhabi.