Madinat Jumeirah reduces carbon footprint

Madinat Jumeirah’s Mina A’Salam Hotel head chef Lee Sugiandi.

It is extremely important to recycle properly in hotels, according to Madinat Jumeirah’s Mina A’Salam Hotel head chef Lee Sugiandi.

“We do loads of things not just with waste management but recycling, Green Globe and sustainability practices. Dubai went though 3.27 million tonnes of food waste in 2015,” said Sugiandi, who was speaking at the recent Caterer Middle East Food & Business Conference, held in Dubai.

He revealed more details on one of the initiatives at the hotel - the glass crusher. “Installing this device has helped us reduce the actual volume of the glass bottles by 80%. Obviously having whole bottles is going to take a lot more space than having them crushed. Along, with this it reduces the cost of waste disposal costs.”

The hotel has also benefitted from installing an oil filtration system. “We just introduced the Vito oil filtration system. This cleans the oil and gives it an increased life cycle of up to 50%, which again helps us save money by not having to buy new oil sooner. This results in our oil consumption dropping by 40%,” he shared, and added: “Once the oil is tested and can’t be used anymore, it is converted to bio diesel. So this not only reduces our cost of throwing it away, but it also gets reused.”

Madinat Jumeirah has also installed a new composting machine.

“The new machine has two people managing the unit, which is not much given the amount of the machine reduces our food waste by. Our composting unit reduces our food waste by 60-70%. The machine produces a soil like matter, which we use as a fertiliser. This also reduces our carbon footprint by eliminating transportation costs and landfills,” Segiandi commented. 

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