Birzeit graduate wins innovation award for eco-friendly waste management solution

Ali Odeh, a graduate of the Institute of Environmental and Water Studies’ master’s program in water and environmental engineering, won the Innovation and Excellence Award at the Second Gulf-Arab Youth Forum, held at the Arab Planning Institute in Kuwait between April 1 and 3, 2019, for his research paper on solid waste management. 

Supervised by Rashed Al-Sa’ed, director of the Institute of Environmental and Water Studies at Birzeit University, the study discusses the planning, operation, and assessment of two pilot programs in composting that used different mixture ratios of domestic organic waste, municipal sewage sludge, horse manure and sawdust. 

In this paper, titled “Evaluation of Windrow Composting Pilots for Domestic Organic Waste Amended by Horse Manure and Biosolids,” the author argues that the results of the experiment show that compost quality complied with US Environmental Protection Agency compost regulations, explaining that all samples of raw and finished compost were free from Salmonella bacteria.

Such experiments, Odeh concludes, show that composting variable mixtures of domestic organics, horse manure, and municipal sludge can serve an effective and sustainable management technology for the reduction of operational expenditure in municipal waste management in Palestine. 

The Second Gulf-Arab Youth Forum, themed “The Role of Youth in Sustainable Development,” aimed to raise awareness of the positive impact of young people in the Arab world in achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.