(1 Feb 2015) LEAD IN:
Every year, thousands of cars in the UAE are abandoned and left to rust, eventually being shipped abroad to be melted down for their steel.
Now, the small UAE emirate of Sharjah has found a way to recycle those discarded motors, turning them into scrap metal in the process.
STORY-LINE:
From piled up autos to useful scrap metal, all in a matter of minutes.
At the plants of Bee'ha, the emirate of Sharjah's own recycling company, they're turning these discarded motors into useful scraps of steel in a flash.
Once any recoverable items like radiators, seats, headlights and tyres have been removed, the vehicle's metal carcasses are lifted into what's called Red Giant.
It's a fitting name, Red Giant is considered the world's most powerful shredding machine, it's able to pull 60 tonnes of car bodies to pieces an hour.
"The grinder eats through the vehicle tipping it into small particles and pieces," explains Najib Faris from Bee'ha.
"It goes into a separation unit where the materials are separated by type and then we see the steel coming out of that end and the non-ferris aluminiums and other materials coming out of the other end."
Faris claims around 300 to 400 hundred cars are discarded everyday across the UAE.
It's thought they're either too old to pass the country's stringent car ownership laws or too badly damaged in a crash.
Some are abandoned in the desert, while others are shipped to places like South East Asia or Africa to be processed into scrap metal.
But now, the emirate of Sharjah has found a new use for some of them.
They're currently recycling 75 to 90 of the 150 cars abandoned in the emirate each day.
Bee'ha claims they could manage 500 at peak capacity during one day shift, more if they added late shifts.
Shipping whole cars abroad for processing is costly, one container ship takes between 17 and 20 whole cars - that's the equivalent of 70 to 80 shredded motors.
By shredding the abandoned autos here in the UAE, the steel can then be shipped straight to the manufacturers' smelters, therefore circumventing a long and expensive delay.
As well as providing a good source of income, it also helps protect the environment, according to Faris.
"You used to see a lot of cars abandoned, sitting, lying there visually polluting the environment," he says.
"Then you've got the second part which is the environmental impact itself; vehicles that are abandoned or left in junkyards are containing a lot of hazardous materials that could affect the environment majorly, be it the liquids, the fluids, the oils, the material itself that's sitting there, and most importantly taking that valuable resource and putting it back into the economic cycle."
Teams of workers remove anything salvageable from the cars until only an empty shell is left.
What they remove can be sold separately.
Bee'ha also has its own tyre recycling plant, which processes 9-thousand tyres a day into rubber tiling for roads and walkways.
The recycling company manages everything from domestic and office waste collection to treatment including food waste, paper and electronic waste.
They also handle cooking oil, industrial waste, wood and construction waste.
It manages the Middle East's largest material recovery facility, it's also the third largest in the world.
Bee'ha's CEO, Khaled Al Huraimel, says the company's eventual aim is to achieve zero landfill.
"We're now trying to treat and recover as much waste as we can," he says.
Not only is Bee'ha cleaning up the emirate's environment, they're also making a profit.
According to Al Huraimel, there's real demand for the materials they recover.
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