Bee’ah celebrates 10th year of keeping Sharjah pristine
SHARJAH: Many great projects begin with the vision of a single individual. It was His Highness Dr Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah, who envisioned the emirate as a beacon of environmental best practice, not just on a national or even regional basis, but ultimately on a global scale.
The realisation of his vision is Bee’ah, a company created by Emiri decree, which in the ten short years of its existence has grown from a new company with just 60 employees, has become an internationally respected player in the ield of waste management, environmental consultation and green energy, currently employing around 7,000 people.
While the enterprise started off with a relatively modest municipal contract for waste collection and disposal in Sharjah through Tandeef, its municipal and commercial collection and cleansing division, the breadth and scale of Bee’ah’s operations today is staggering. Covering everything from integrated waste management to public cleansing, environmental consulting, education and awareness, renewable energy, facilities management and sustainable development, the company has begun to diversify into other ields including digital technology and real estate.
“By any measure, our growth has been spectacular,” said Salim Bin Mohamed Al Owais, Bee’ah’s Chairman of the Board of Directors. “Yet as we celebrate our tenth anniversary and look back with an immense sense of pride at just how far we have come, we do so also with a sense of humility, knowing that we have much to do and that our journey has really only just begun.”
At the very beginning of that journey, one of Bee’ah’s irst tasks was to take over the operation and maintenance of Sharjah’s Al Saj’ah landill site. It’s a responsibility which is loaded with symbolism and which has a particular resonance to this day.that’s because Bee’ah has set itself the ambitious target of diverting 100 per cent of Sharjah’s waste material away from landill, thereby creating the irst zero-waste-to-landill city in the Middle East.
With that goal in mind, Bee’ah set about improving the infrastructure as well as the systems and procedures at Al Saj’ah. In doing so, the site was transformed into a fully engineered landill, operating in compliance with the latest international standards. This transformation was a powerful statement, a tangible demonstration of Bee’ah’s determination to make a difference in a region where environmental concerns have all too often been sidelined in the scramble for economic, social and industrial development.
Today, as the company continues to develop and expand, the Al Saj’ah Waste Management Centre sits at the heart of Bee’ah’s operations as part of a broader, more holistic approach to waste management. With the addition of several specialised material processing facilities, Tadweer, Bee’ah’s waste sorting and treatment division, can ensure a safe and controlled disposal and recovery process for a wide variety of materials. These include paper, plastic, tyres, rubber, vehicles, metal, construction and demolition waste. Highly specialised facilities are also in place to handle the recycling of sensitive documentation and the processing of medical waste, the latter through Wekaya, Bee’ah’s joint venture with Green Planet.