A recycling startup in Ramallah processes plastic garbage into recycled pellets using machines that sort, wash, dry, shred, and melt waste plastic. The co-founders, friends since childhood, created the operation after the Gaza war began and conditions in the occupied West Bank became harder. Movement restrictions reduced access to jobs in Israel and increased checkpoints and barriers across the West Bank. Garbage collection and disposal became more difficult as waste went uncollected, was dumped illegally, or accumulated in areas where it previously stayed temporarily. The startup operates near a main garbage transfer point, turning local plastic waste into raw material again.
"“From waste plastic to raw material again,” explains mechanical engineer Ibrahim Ghazal, who sifts through a handful of pellets from a bag weighing several tons. Ghazal is one of the co-founders of this start-up recycling operation called Scrapcycle Solutions. Friends since childhood, Ghazal and his business partner Faris Abu Keshek got the idea for the recycling startup after the war in Gaza started and life in this occupied Palestinian territory got a lot more difficult."
"The tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians who worked in Israel before the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel are no longer allowed to cross into the Jewish state. And checkpoints and controls on movement within the West Bank itself have proliferated. The Israeli military has installed massive concrete and metal gates around Palestinian villages to close them off whenever it deems necessary, and hundreds of new checkpoints have been put in place."
"The heightened restrictions on movement make every aspect of life more difficult for the 3.4 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, in particular the collection and disposal of garbage. Palestinians are now living among waste as garbage goes uncollected, is dumped illegally, or piles up in places where it only sat temporarily before. Scrapcycle Solutions sits across from the main garbage transfer point in Ramallah."
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]