Dubai, UAE, 25 March 2018: The Dubai Municipality (DM) has developed its ‘Wasteniser’ project as its proposal for the Dubai 10X Initiative, a venture overseen by the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF), the organisation said in a Press communiqué. The project aims at converting the city’s solid waste into a source of energy by using artificial intelligence (AI) to address current and future waste-related challenges and maintain sustainability, the communiqué said.

Dawood Abdul Rahman Abdullah Al Hajiri, Director General, Dubai Municipality, said, “We must face the challenges and strive to meet the project’s strategic goals, which seek to make Dubai the first and only city in the world to use artificial intelligence in transporting and processing waste to generate clean and sustainable energy.”

Al Hajiri added, “The municipality has set an action plan to implement the project immediately after the launch; the plan is titled ‘The Vision of the Future City, Today’. To that end, we formed a task force consisting of young, passionate and driven Emiratis to carry out this initiative and firmly establish the global leadership of the DM. We are working to create an ecosystem that embraces change and a smart, flexible environment that engages both the public and private sectors, as well as the general public, to implement the services of the future.”

The communiqué said that the project includes building the world’s largest energy terminal in terms of production capacity and thermal conversion efficiency. This, in turn, contributes to the Dubai Integrated Waste Management Master Plan, which seeks to steer 100% of the city’s waste away from landfills by the year 2030, the communiqué further said.

Once implemented, the Wasteniser system will produce 17,500 tonnes of good ash for the production of green concrete, the communiqué said. The initiative consists of developing a world-first, decentralised waste-treatment platform for buildings and residential districts in Dubai, the communiqué further said. The system uses technology developed by the Dubai Municipality to treat all types of solid waste after sorting it using AI and smart technologies, the communiqué explained. The decentralised units raise the temperature of the waste, resulting in the breakdown of its chemical components, producing clean electrical energy that will be exported to the local electricity grid, the communiqué added.

The communiqué said that H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Chairman of Dubai Executive Council and Chairman of DFF’s Board of Trustees, launched the plan, among several avant-garde proposals for Dubai 10X, at the 6th World Government Summit, held in February 2018, in Dubai.