Sustainable AASTMT

2022-2023

AASTMT underscores its commitment to embedding social and environmental responsibilities into its core operations. By prioritizing sustainable procurement practices, the institution not only enhances its environmental stewardship but also sets an example for other organizations to follow. This holistic approach ensures that sustainability is not an isolated effort but an integral part of AASTMT's organizational culture, fostering long-term positive impacts on the environment, society, and economy. All policies related to this indicator are represented under title “Ethical Sourcing of Food and Supplies”, and the Policy statement in point number 5.

Consumption and Recycling Policy

1. Introduction

The huge pressure on environmental resources, increasing greenhouse gases, unprecedented rates of CO2 emissions, rising sea levels, pollution, overpopulation, resource waste, and land degradation affect the current and future generations. They face surmountable challenges due to climate change, resource scarcity, waste management, and insufficient recycling practices. Recycling is a cornerstone of addressing these issues, as it reduces resource waste, alleviates pollution, and contributes to managing land degradation. AASTMT has established policies to achieve sustainable development goals, helping uphold the University's Environmental Change and Social Duty Policy and keep the surrounding society and the community in good health and safe.

The policy places strong emphasis on recycling to lessen negative natural effects emerging from our era of waste raising, looking to foresee, reuse, recycle, repurpose, and decrease waste from our activity. Recycling is further integrated into the Policy, which likewise plans to guarantee that AASTMT oversees waste and recycling issues as per the counteraction of contamination and consistent with natural enactment. Recycling serves as a key strategy in fulfilling these commitments and creating a sustainable environment for all.

1. Scope

It is the responsibility of all employees, students, and contractors working to handle, deal with, and store all kinds of waste, including hazardous materials and other types of waste, with a strong emphasis on recycling. Recycling should be a priority at every level of waste management, ensuring that materials are sorted, processed, and reused whenever possible. In addition, assign the person who is responsible for these materials to oversee their recycling and disposal in the most suitable and environmentally friendly way. Recycling hazardous materials and other types of waste not only minimizes environmental harm but also aligns with sustainable waste management practices. Recycling initiatives should be integrated into all handling and disposal processes to support the university’s environmental goals.

1. Aims of the Policy

The AASTMT policy considers end-of-life disposal costs and environmental impacts when making acquisition decisions involving the construction of new or renovated facilities. 

AASTMT receives the 'waste order' of Prevention, reuse, reusing, and other recuperation and removal. AASTMT executes cycles, methods, and activities that guarantee consistency with ecological enactment and best practice, to lessen the general waste produced and forestall waste creation at every possible opportunity. Moreover, AASTMT is committed to measuring and weighing the amount of waste generated to track the waste and to find the best methods to reduce or recycle it.

1. Procedures

The Waste Treatment Progressive System and Stages Incorporates:

Prevention

• Utilizing less material in the plan; keeping items for more; utilizing less unsafe material.
• Reduce landfill waste and boost the usage of reusable, biodegradable, and recyclable materials.

RE-USE

• Getting ready for re-use; cleaning; fixing, restoring.
• Reduce the usage of single-use packaging. Reducing single-use packaging such as coffee cups and increasing the usage of reusable packaging

Recycle

• Transforming waste disposal into another substance or item, including fertilizing the soil.

• Anaerobic assimilation – transformation to biogas for power age; burning with energy recuperation.

Disposal

• Reduce the disposal of items and send them by specialized to landfill to bury the hazardous materials.
• Tracking the disposal items through a third party which evaluates the amount and the cost of the disposal items.

Ethical Sourcing of Food and Supplies

AASTMT is seeking to reduce food waste as much as we can through using food preservation methods and vermicomposting practices. The university is committed to delivering healthy food for all parties in the university including food on Campus, Residences, and employees whether vegetarian or others. AASTMT makes sure that the food is available at each level to guarantee healthy food for ASTMT’s stakeholders. However, food waste is still a problem for AASTMT. Therefore, AASTMT is applying the following procedures to use the waste of food in an appropriate way:

1. Develop a monitoring system for food donations by using food waste.
2. Most of the food waste produced is recorded and weighed to be sent to a device that produces bio-fertilizer for the green areas.
3. Some of the waste of food is used to feed the animals like (dogs, and cats,

1. Policy Statement

The AASTMT seeks to implement ethical and sustainable practices on all of its campuses. Therefore, the AASTMT has taken crucial measures to implement these practices, such as ecological practices and corporate social responsibility. Through the exchange of information within the Academy's supply chain, these food ethics and practices enable AASTMT to ensure the transparency of information about all suppliers.

• Trusted suppliers

To accomplish supply chain transparency, one of the primary goals of AASTMT is to identify the most reliable and reputable partners who share the same ethical practices, objectives, and data. To accomplish ethical and sustainable practices, the first step is to identify the most suitable suppliers.

• Secure Relationships

The interaction with suppliers is the second step to keep secure relationships between partners and to reduce the risk. AASTMT is seeking to build a platform and application to increase communication and share important information. That would give the suppliers and partners access to the internal systems they need based on their roles within the ecosystem, sustainability practices, and the food ethics of AASTMT.

• Tracing the food supplies

Through utilizing new technologies such as block chain technology, AASTMT plays a crucial role in facilitating the monitoring and tracing of the origin of food. It allows the AASTMT to trace the origin of food and ensure its safe delivery to campuses.

• Evaluation of the process

AASTMT is monitoring the overall processes between its partners to guarantee healthy and sustainable food for students, staff, and Residents. Based on this monitoring, errors must be fixed, and corrective action must be taken.

AASTMT guarantees that we are conforming to guidelines, enactment, and best practices to limit the danger of prompt and future contamination or mischief to wellbeing when completing operational exercises.

1. Actions

• A proposition to build a Waste Management Centre throughout all AASTMT campuses to oversee every aspect of waste management within the Academy, and to recycle all type of materials generated.
• AASTMT is about to build a packaging lab, this lab is aiming to act as a hub providing packaging services consultancy for Egyptian and research on the field of packaging supply chain. The materials of this lab will be extracted from cartoon and plastic waste from the AASTMT campus to produce packaging prototype designs.
• AASTMT has halted the utilization of 'single use' plastics nearby utilizing a blend of elective materials and the suspension of deals of plastic filtered water nearby.
• AASTMT perceives the unfavorable effect of plastic waste, from creation through to removal. Plastic contamination can destructively affect the marine climate, and the College is looking to diminish plastic use and wastage nearby. The accompanying activities have been received to advance this point with staff and understudies:
• Single-use plastics in catering (food bundling, dispensable coffee cups, cutlery) have been supplanted with compostable catering supplies in all College food outlets, to lessen plastic waste nearby.
• AASTMT intends to keep on diminishing waste by investigating new items and administrations which will help with accomplishing decreased plastics utilization and waste.
• AASTMT will consider the hazardous materials that can be hurtful to the well-being or the climate. It incorporates irresistible organic/clinical waste, synthetics, solvents, pesticides, glaring light cylinders, refrigeration hardware containing ozone, non-eatable oils, batteries, asbestos, and paints. AASTMT will have an agreement with a third party to landfill these materials in a landfill area.
• The AASTMT will oversee, so far as is sensibly practicable, all dangerous waste exercises fall under its influence in a way, for example, to limit the mischief to human wellbeing or the climate.
• AASTMT will create and impart systems to empower workers to follow their “obligation of care” for the administration of risky wastes and screen these methods to guarantee consistency.
  

1. Objectives:

Waste ought to be forestalled or limited at every possible opportunity. AASTMT empowers staff, Students, and employers to limit plastic and cartoon waste, in addition to increasing the awareness about the method to minimize disposable items.

1. Review Program

You can read our Consumption and Recycling Policy on AASTMT website.

More activities are applied and practiced in the AASTMT.

Turning Waste into Sustainable Solutions: AASTMT’s Focus on Vermicomposting

Part of its continuous dedication to sustainable waste management and recycling techniques, the Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport (AASTMT) is aggressively investigating vermicomposting. By improving soil quality, increasing drainage, and lowering soil erosion, vermicomposting—a green method—transforms organic waste into nutrient-rich compost so supporting sustainable development. Apart from improving food preservation and crop yields, this natural composting technique is quite important in reducing methane and CO₂ emissions from organic waste. In line with sustainable development objectives, AASTMT keeps using vermicomposting over its campuses to generate fertilizers for agricultural areas, so supporting environmentally friendly waste disposal and environmentally conscious practices.

The Aquaculture Research Centre (ARC) of AASTMT on the main campus supervises this two-path recycling system. Waste is gathered and placed in earthworm composting pens in the first path, where it is transformed into vermicompost—then applied as organic fertilizer for landscaping. With some of the worms used in the fish culture operations of the ARC, the worms generated by this process also grow in number. The second route treats the waste to create soluble fertilizers and biogas. For several ARC operations, this biogas provides a substitute energy source that emphasizes AASTMT's creative approach to waste management and sustainable energy. By means of continuous vermicomposting programs, AASTMT keeps encouraging environmentally friendly behaviors and transforms waste into valuable resources for landscaping and agricultural operations over its campuses.

Turning Waste into Sustainable Solutions

AASTMT Campus Smart Recycling System to turn Food Organic Wastes & Recyclables into Economic Value Products

The Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport (AASTMT) has successfully implemented a sustainable, self-sufficient recycling system on its campus, aimed at transforming organic food waste and recyclable materials into valuable products that contribute to reducing campus operating expenses. The system specifically targets organic food waste, plastic tableware, and aluminum cans, converting these waste streams into economically beneficial outputs. Through this project, AASTMT produces a portion of its disposable plastic tableware on-site using a plastic injection machine located at the Integrated Service Center (ISC). Additionally, the project lowers costs for campus fertilizers and provides raw aluminum materials for students' graduation projects. To achieve these goals, AASTMT has developed and integrated several recycling units, including a portable compost unit to create organic fertilizer, molds for the plastic injection machine, a unit for washing, drying, and disinfecting plastic tableware, an aluminum can crusher to compact cans before melting, and an electrical furnace for producing aluminum bars. The project continues to operate on campus, showcasing AASTMT's commitment to sustainable practices and efficient waste management.

AASTMT Campus Smart Recycling System

AASTMT Campus Smart Recycling System

AASTMT Campus Smart Recycling System