Such was the opinion of Thierry Pepe, director of Saur International Contracting, in a short but pointed presentation at the end of the first working day of the Gulf Environmental Forum in Jeddah on Monday.
A major part of that, he said, is not just the waste but transportation and the lack of monitoring of what trucks actually contain as they pump and dump.
“I think there is a long way to go for small industries to apply the rules (on avoiding pollution),” he said. As a former consultant for the development of waste treatment in Makkah, he had observed the large number of sewage trucks.
“Those trucks are not only transporting domestic effluent, but some small industries are using them to transport their effluent that sometimes contains heavy metals and greases which are very difficult to trace once they are at the sewage plant.”
Mixed with domestic sewage, these toxic materials render the recycling of sewage into useable water much more difficult, assuming sewage processors are aware of precisely what is in the raw product. “This was a big problem that we had to face, especially in the Kingdom. We have to face this ­— heavy industries follow the rules, but there is a big challenge to get the small industries to enforce the rules,” he said.
Opening the session, Jamil Abdulrazak reviewed some of the areas that rightly belonged in a review. The issues were many, ranging from the local effects of industry on the countries of the GCC as well as the bloc as a whole. These, he said, should then be expanded to take in the macro-issues of climate change and the environment as a whole.
“What is most important is that we have to look at the issue of sustainability to maintain and regenerate the system,” he said.
Osama Fageeha, general supervisor of environmental engineering at Saudi Aramco, presented a detailed survey of the complex environmental audit and procedures that the company follows as a matter of course in its operations. He listed the pillars of the company’s business operations as environmental protection, safety, economic viability and operational reliability all bound together with human resources.
He noted that each was an integral part of the company’s approach to business and suggested that environmental concerns should be part of an integrated approach to businesses in every company. As just one example of walking the walk, he said, “Our sanitary and wastewater reuse is currently 73 percent and within two years will reach 84 percent. We have set a target that by 2020 it will be at 94 percent.”
The national average for the Kingdom, according to the National Water Company, is 16 percent — with some areas as low as six percent. The conference enters its second and final working day on Tuesday.