Justin Sharp, Senior Vice President-International of Canada-based SNC-Lavalin Profac, said governments in the Middle East should now start motivating people to go into recycling their waste products and encouraging companies to sell credits for polluting less with carbon.
Sharp said the recycling market in the region was still very small compared to that in the advanced countries, especially in North America, where the recycling rate — other than for paper — in many municipalities and townships has already reached 70 percent.
“If we would create a market here for those products then we would accelerate the use of recycling and reduce waste,” he said. “You can also capture your emission to sell reduced carbon emission from your building,” he added.
Emissions trading, sometimes called cap and trade, is an administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emission of pollutants. It has already created an emerging global market in the wake of environmental calls to mitigate global warming.
Sharp said oil and gas companies in the Middle East can also make profits if governments subsidise 20 percent of the cost of using highly efficient machinery. “These incentives should come here if we want the Gulf to go green. It’s a matter of how we motivate people,” Sharp said.
Sharp, however, said it was still too early for governments in the Gulf to make legislation on recycling and carbon emissions since a lot of schemes for this are being used in advanced countries in North America and Europe.
“For me it’s a question of watching what works in the developing markets and then trying to get the best of those options,” Sharp said.
