Waste collection

A UAE twist to the good old

Otto garbage bins back home!

Dubai might the shopping mecca of the Middle East but it ain’t so flash for waste collection.

If you live in a multistory apartment building then you have it quite easy when it comes to garbage disposal. There are garbage disposal shoots on each level that lead to waste skips at the base. Complications can arise when it comes to Ramadan.

The word Ramadan is derived from the word ramd - "to burn". For Muslims, the entire month is spent fasting from dawn to dusk. Fasting during this month is often thought to figuratively burn away all sins.

So what connections do waste collection and Ramadan have I hear you say. Well in some apartment buildings the waste was not collected as often during 2006 Ramadan and garbage in the waste shoots can back up several floors….not good for the nose I dare say! But everything returned to normal once Ramadan was over thank goodness.

Back in Australia individual villas and houses have their own garbage bins not in Dubai. There is no house to house garbage collection, in place of this system are waste skips placed approximately every 50 meters along a residential street. So when your kitchen garbage bins fills up, you take a little trip outside to throw your little plastic garbage bag into the big waste skip. Back home you could duck outside out your jim-jams (PJ’s) if you were a little lazy at times but there’s no chance of that here, unless you’re fine to parade your sleepwear in plane view of the neighbours!

Luckily down our end of the villa complex there are only houses on one side of the street, so there’s plenty of room for garbage in the skip. But up the other end there are houses and villas on both sides of the street and that skip gets full pretty early in the week. So it’s a buggery when the skips get pretty full and you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to get big bag of rubbish into the skip without having to physically touch anything.

You will notice in the background there are a lot of construction cranes. 15% of the cranes in the world can be found in Dubai, there’s just an enormous amount of growth going on here at the moment.