Waste Management Facility from The Gazelle on Vimeo.

On April 6, members from the Ecoherence Student Interest Group went on a tour of NYU Abu Dhabi’s recycling and waste management facilities. Louise Larkins, Soft Services Manager of Serco, was kind enough to guide us through the maze of car parks underground and talk to us about this aspect of the university’s efforts to make our campus more sustainable.

Many major improvements have been made since Ecoherence’s last visit in October 2016. Now, the university has three new waste management machines: the compactor, the baler and the bulb crusher. The compactor, as the name indicates, compacts general waste so that it takes up less space and can be transported more efficiently. The baler condenses cardboard and plastic into bales of a more manageable size. The bulb crusher crushes lightbulbs, turning otherwise cumbersome bulbs into dust. The major change as a result of these machines is the frequency of trucks taking the waste off-campus. For general waste, this frequency has been reduced significantly from once a day to once every four days.

Aside from the machine’s work, there is a lot of human work that goes into dealing with our trash. Serco workers run the machines, collect trash from refuse rooms across campus and move it to the lower basement level. There, waste technicians pick it up and move it to the central waste management area. After that, most of the trash will go through a second manual sorting to ensure the maximum recycling rate.

Students and faculty have raised concerns about seeing Serco workers dumping trash into one bag, however, Larkins clarified that all the trash collected goes through a round of checking and sorting before they can be put into one of the three machines for further processing. The main problem Serco is facing is that sometimes trash is not separated properly; for example, soda cans sometimes end up in the general waste bin because it was in the same bag as other food waste —therefore a second round of sorting needs to take place.

Dealing with waste can be quite a complicated process. In addition to the waste mentioned above, Serco has to manage medical waste produced by Health and Wellness, e-waste and food waste from the dining hall. Food waste is currently treated as general waste, but by the end of April, a food composter will be added to the waste management machines on campus. The composter will process food waste produced from all dining outlets on campus, including the dining hall, library cafe and the Marketplace.