ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - The Mayoralty of Baghdad announced on Wednesday the launch of a waste-to-energy project within the next six months that will be able to generate 45 megawatts of electricity for every 3,000 tons of waste.

“The project includes preparing two sites for this purpose, the first in Nahrawan and the second in Abu Ghraib, and through the plant, 3,000 tons of waste will be burned and converted into electrical energy with a capacity of 45 megawatts per hour,” Mohammed al-Rubaie, Director of Relations and Media at the Mayoralty of Baghdad told state media.

“This project is the first of its kind in Iraq to convert waste into electrical energy,” Rubaie detailed, adding that the implementation of the project has been assigned to a Chinese firm which “has the capacity and capabilities necessary to complete the project within the next six months.”

Once the first phase of the project is concluded, the mayoralty will assign another firm to 6,000 tons of waste in another location, the official noted.

Iraq’s Deputy Environment Minister Jassim al-Falahi told The New Region in an interview in May 2024 that the government is working on two projects that would “recycle 6,000 tons of waste into energy per month,” adding that they have prepared an additional 22 projects as part of the federal budget’s investment expenditure, through which they will renovate waste recycling laboratories across the country.

Falahi stated that Iraq disposes around 40 million tons of waste, while it can recycle 54 percent of said waste into energy.

According to the Ministry of Environment, each Iraqi individual disposes of around one kilogram of waste per day.

A mid-2022 report by the United Nations Environment Program outlined that Iraq trailed only Bahrain in the Central Asia region regarding food waste.

The report revealed that an average Iraqi discards around 120 kilograms of food per year, contributing to an annual food waste tally of approximately five million tons in the country.

According to data from the Central Statistical Organization for the Environmental Services Sector in 2021, the total annual collection of regular waste, which includes food waste, stood at 11.2 million tons.