BACKGROUND

The Arab Region with its diverse countries and hundreds of millions of people is currently suffering from a lack of waste-management-capacity, similar to many other regions of the world. Garbage is often being land-filled, and this causes the pollution of air, soil, water, and biota, and it also often causes serious garbage-accumulation near urban ecosystems.  Even if this wasn’t the case, there is a global imperative towards a more efficient use of our limited resources.  This requires a change of thinking, industry and behaviour.

PURPOSE

We aim to provide an impetus towards the development of efficiently distributed waste management facilities, protecting the environment by stimulating awareness and demand for recycling facilities, and to illustrate that such an industry is not only desirable, but potentially very profitable.

STRATEGY

The basis of this project begins with changing the attitudes of children, but includes the re-education of adults.  We identify potential partners, and through our awareness campaigns, contests, and media events, we want to develop a focal point for autonomic adoption, self-management, and networking of recycling partners.  The www.arabrecycling.com website will function as a central resource of information for educators to help teach sustainability concepts in school as well as offer stakeholders a situational map of recycling capacity.

COOPERATION

Cooperation opportunities revolve around enhancing our data gathering and awareness campaign.  This can take the form of in kind contributions of time, resources, as well as financial. 

An example of the kind of support we use is our recently established a partnership agreement with 2B Communications.  They are already providing the hosting and website design, and in the future we expect them to take over more and more of the responsibilities of ensuring the success for this project.  In the mean time we are helping them develop their contacts and processes so that they can provide a highly valuable service towards waste management in the region.

In case you have any interest to support UNESCO's work in this highly relevant initiative please feel free to contact m.sutcliffe(at)unesco.org or b.benno(at)unesco.org for more information.