EGT is Famous, Goodbye to Jordan, and the Next Step

It has been some time since my last post, and a lot has happened! EGT and the recycling program have grown, and have grown famous!

First Treehugger profiled us and highlighted the work of Andreas Petsas and Glen Walker. I mentioned Glen and Andreas in the last post, they are Manufacturing Engineers and recent graduates of Cambridge University. They did a tremendous job of following leads and analyzing the networks of recycling in Jordan. We joked that at the end of their weeks in Jordan they knew more about the big picture of recycling in Jordan than anyone in the country and it was probably true!

More recently, Jordan Business wrote a feature article on the accomplishments of EGT. It is a great article and gives a picture of the whole company, including the recycling business.

I left Jordan in June. I never posted an official goodbye, but I just want to say how grateful I am to everyone I lived and worked with. It was an amazing time and I learned so much. Thank you all!

I will start writing about my new enterprise from now on. The hiatus in the blog has been due to demands of the entrepreneurial venture I am currently involved with, Colorado Forest and Energy. From now on you can expect posts to be relevant to that business, distributed clean electricity generation and the clean tech world in general.

Onward!

EAB update

It is just over 1 week until I head back home, I thought I would update with some of the improvements Magid has made to the site.

Here he is with the PET in its new, hopefully temporary home. Those bunkers behind are also full. This is about 5 tons of PET, but we have some ideas about buyers so it will hopefully be more than an eyesore soon.

All materials will be sorted and put directly into tire bays now, this will decrease the number of bags we have to use. Magid is showing us plastic. The bays are sized so that he knows about how much they should weigh when they are full, a full one should be about a truckload. When they are full he weighs them for the exact number and sends them to sale.

Tire garden looks great. Eggplant, grapes, tomatoes, broccoli, spinach, lettuce, cauliflower, excellente.

This is for you know who.

Plastic Remanufacturing

These pics are from a while back, I forgot to post them, some shots of a factory that buys plastic from scavengers and makes office chairs.

Injection molder

Grinder and a pile of nylon.

A different grinder.

Not the most organized factory.

Ghabawi Landfill

I got to go out and visit the big landfill that is receiving waste from several big cities including Amman. For someone working on a recycling project it was a pretty motivating experience.

This column of smoke was coming up from a power plant on the way to the dump. We asked the guys around it what was going on, they said they gathered all the trash from around there and burned it. We ask why, given that they were literally neighbors of the dump, they didn't take it there. They didn't really have an answer for that.

The weight bridge, you get weighed in, and then again empty on the way out.

The expanding edge. The dump is done in layers, which is covered each day with soil.

Everything that isn't soil is from today so far, it was about 11am.

A municipal truck with a compactor bulldozer behind it.

This bulldozer is not a compactor, you can tell by the caterpillars.

This is methane bubbling up through the leachate, 2 pretty horrible things. The leachate is literally trash juice, and this is coming from the completed cell 1. Cell 1 is 3.5 million tons of garbage. The methane coming out is 21x more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

This is a leachate treatment pool. Right now they are not actually treating the leachate. This, combined with the fact that cell 1 was overfilled, means that this toxic juice is getting into the soil and then the groundwater. It is the most foul substance I have ever seen. Yummers.

Community Recycling Ventures

I found a really promising model for how we can work with our ecoRangers in a financially sustainable way. I am not sure how this will translate into the Jordanian context, especially given the presence of scavengers and the informal waste sector who take the most valuable waste, but the concept of recycling and repurposing waste as a form of stable employment for at risk men and youth is pretty promising. Collection on the streets and in neighborhoods is difficult because the informal sector can always outmanuever a bureaucratic program for the valuable waste. They don't take all recyclable waste if it takes a lower price or is bulky, and the informal recyclers don't provide environmental benefit because waste is transported so many times before it arrives at the Material Recovery Facility and the MRF itself is not environmental. At the same time, collection from large accounts is very difficult without large scale equipment, and when you try to manage the entire waste stream it requires a lot of time and resources to organize the waste in the account.
Here is the example from Australia http://www.communityrecycling.com.au/, a partnership between Eaglehawk Recycle Shop and Future Employment Opportunities Inc. Check out the brief description here http://www.communityrecycling.com.au/a-guide. They are supported by a social venture fund called Social Ventures Australia (http://socialventures.com.au/).

Right now our training is going really well, but at the end of 3 months have to part with guys we would really like to keep working with. The idea is to catalyze some recycling program that recognizes the value of these guys over capital intensive solutions so that they have more employment opportunities.

Recycled Products ctnd

Check out a couple more, shelves and clothes rack (the hangers are also from the waste).



Shelves close up.

Recycled Products

A few things we do with materials...

Tree rings and planters.

More containers, to keep in mulch and water.

A fine desk from an old glass door and Polystyrene.

Old bricks, polystyrene, and a bigger door. Nice kitchen island, no?

21st Century Storgage

All of our storage is moving into tire bays. We can sort from the table right into the bays and then we don't have to use as many bags.

Justifiably proud of their work, Ahmed and Hatim.

Soon the tires will all have things growing in them. Maybe we can even paint them. Imagine an ecoPark with recycling storage as well as raised bed organic gardens all made of tires.

Go Hatim!

Scale

We got a scale! Turns out one of the guys on the site used to work in a steel shop and he is an expert on the scale. 15 and a scale expert, ya salaam. We used this to figure out today how much we can make on one round on a cart. The first day's test was about 3 dollars, the second day was less than 1. Materials sales are not going to drive this program!

Compost bin/ Recycling Bin

A couple new products from Eyn al Basha...

Can't argue with a recycling bin made of all recyclable materials.

This is the compost bin. The wooden slats on the back are nailed on, each side has removable slats. This near side has the slats out. The bins are set up next to each other so that when it is time to turn the compost (about once a month) you remove the slats on the sides and everything moves right. You use about 4 bins, so after 4 months the final bin is moving right, out of the bins and into the garden! The slats are spaced with small pieces of wood to allow good air circulation.

Cutting Glass Bottles

I tried cutting glass bottles and it actually worked pretty well. Fill a bottle with water up to the line you want the cut at, soak a string in alcohol, tie it around the bottle at the line, light the string, finally dunk the bottle in ice cold water with pressure and viola! I am going to try cutting the bottom off of wine bottles and using them as light shades for the lights hanging from the ceiling. Maybe pics soon.

Compost Experiment

We got together with our friend Ragheda to help her start moving her large and very beautiful garden to be fully organic. She is also working to incorporate organic gardening into a program she runs for mentally handicapped adults.

This is an example of a compost pit.

Oh yeah, she also has gazelle on her property.

Some nice covered vegetable gardens.

Just to add some contrast, you can see Baga'a from the house. I have been told it is the largest refugee camp in the world, home to 250,000 Palestinians. The extreme density of housing characterizes the camps in Jordan.

Graduation

Just a quick pic from the whole crew at the most recent graduation.

We had three graduates, we are working hard to grow the program and generate the cash flow we need to afford jobs for them. Balancing the short term survival of the program with the long term planning is not easy.

Late night cardboard run

We got word that someone dumped a whole bunch of cardboard out in an empty lot, they called in the eco-Rangers. It turned out the cardboard was full of styrofoam so we couldn't take it all, we stuffed as much styrofoam as we could in a couple of boxes and took the rest. I just wanted to post something about the work we do to figure out what the factors are that need resolution in order to build a real grassroots recycling system.


In this case we obviously need a better system.

The New Cart

Our new cart arrived! This is the main tool of the eco-Rangers, collecting with the cart and then the truck brings material down to Ayn al-Basha for sorting.
Go boys go!

The team and the folks from Shems, the french NGO that donate to the program. Big thanks to them. The cart made for a very exciting day and they really made it possible.

That is Magid with the cart. Magid teaches the class and oversees the sorting. Magid is a rock, we have some pretty young guys and some pretty old guys working with us and everyone looks up to him. He is a great manager and leader.

Heloowa!