Tawazon

Tawazon is Citadel Capital’s Platform Company for investment in the regional solid waste management industry. The sector is rapidly developing throughout the region with a limited number of large companies and often inefficient and incomplete operations translating into significant pockets of unserved demand.

This platform investment holds two companies: Egyptian Company for Solid Waste Management (ECARU), a solid waste management service provider, and the Engineering Tasks Group (ENTAG), a solid waste management engineering and contracting company. Together, these two companies form a leading waste management enterprise with extensive operations in Egypt as well as international exposure to Oman, Malaysia, Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

OPERATIONAL UPDATE

Established in 1997, ECARU specializes in both municipal and agricultural waste management. The company was granted a contract to receive, sort, treat and landfill up to 1,500 tons of municipal solid waste per day for a flat annual tipping fee. After ECARU receives the MSW, it separates the recyclables (such as glass and plastic) for resale, uses organic material in the waste to produce low quality compost and finally landfills the rejected waste.

ECARU also has contracts to collect and process up to 525,506 tons of agricultural solid waste in return for service fees. ECARU processes and converts the waste collected into higher value products such as compost, animal fodder (where it has pioneered a technology to produce pre-digested food to be used as food substitute for feed stock) as well as compressed and ground agricultural products to be used as fuel substitutes.

ECARU was one of the first Egyptian organizations to sign a greenhouse gas emission reduction purchase agreement with the World Bank in the summer of 2008, agreeing to sell 325,480 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emission reductions to the Carbon Fund for Europe. The company is one of only a handful of similar UN-backed clean development mechanism projects operating in Egypt to date. ECARU is currently in the validation period, where the company is actively providing the necessary information to ensure that the process moves as swiftly and as quickly as possible.

ECARU’s sister-company ENTAG, established in 1995, is a regional leader in the turn-key engineering and construction of solid waste handling and sorting facilities and the fabrication and assembly of equipment. It is specialized in designing, manufacturing and erecting solid waste management systems. ENTAG’s equipment is partly procured from the world’s leading waste management equipment producers and partly designed and manufactured locally in Egypt. The company has thus far completed more than 61 sorting and composting plants in Egypt and another 13 plants in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Libya, and Sudan. ENTAG’s services are the “door opener” for ECARU, which can then properly manage the facilities built by ENTAG.