Lack of recycling infrastructure is costing Kurdistan Region millions

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Kurdistan Region continues to lose money by only recycling steel and ignoring other raw materials.

Recycling in the Kurdistan Region is almost wholly restricted to steel, with over 4,000 industrial factories for metal re-usage, but no facilities for reprocessing other raw materials.

Hiwa Dawa, the manager at a local waste site, says the autonomous Kurdish region could make much more profit if it recycled other material.

“The Kurdistan Region has thousands of tons of reusable material from plastic, copper, and brass yet only steel is recycled and reused while we sell other waste materials to the neighboring countries for a small fee,” Dawa told Kurdistan 24.

According to data from the Ministry of Finance and Trade, the Kurdistan Region currently has 4,088 steel-recycling factories.

Abdul-Razaq Nawandy, the director general of Divan from the Ministry of Trade and Industry, said the Kurdistan Region needs at least 1,000 other facilities to recycle different materials and reuse them in local markets.

“The governmental stakeholders need to work with local investors to develop the industrial sector of the region and stop exporting goods that we can recycle,” Nawandy told Kurdistan 24.

“At the same time, it would provide thousands of job opportunities for people.”

Although the Kurdistan Region produces thousands of tons of reusable waste, it has not adequately benefited from it and ends up losing a lot of money by selling and exporting the various waste to neighboring countries only to repurchase it later as raw material and for ten times the price it was sold.  

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany

(Additional reporting by Dyari Sheka)