Business innovators help city adopt recycling

The most polluted city during smog season, Lahore, has championed recycling the increasing solid waste generated in the walled city, paving the way for young innovators and fledgling start-ups to exploit the untapped wealth for eco-friendly solutions.

Several business organisations are aggressively working on waste recycling into reusable eco-friendly material.

“We produce multiple daily use items like benches, tables, racks and makeshift bathrooms from plastic waste. Our products are not only used locally but also exported,” said Bilal Ahmed, the business head of a recycling project.

“We also produce manhole covers from plastic waste and have installed 350 in Lahore,” he said.

The company is also selling six-layer wood pulp extracted from tetra pack for Rs100 per kg, which has four layers of plastics, one of aluminum and one of paper.

“The machinery used in the project was previously imported from Germany, China and Taiwan but now we are also focusing on indigenisation.

Our products are environment friendly as we do not use any chemical during processing and segregation of plastics for recycling,” he added.

Ahmed said the company also produced staple fibre from plastic bottles to prepare non-concrete and water, snow and pests resistant washrooms and kitchens, comprising 95 per cent recycled material.

One company has the capacity to recycle 450 tonnes of different types of plastic waste and 100 tonnes of packaging material.

As less heed was often paid to the sector, the Institute of Urbanism (IoU) and Heinrich Böll Stiftung took an initiative to provide firsthand knowledge to opinion makers about waste collection, landfill sites and recycling during their visit to Mahmood Booti and Lakhodair dumping sites.

An official of another leading company in plastic bottles recycling and manufacturing regenerated, recycled and carded polyester fibre from PET bottles said it had recycled more than 18,000 metric tonnes of bottles last year.

“Our company prepares 32 products from PET bottles while also having a capacity of daily producing 55 tonnes of polyester fibre,” he said.