Dubai, 17 November 2014: Sims Recycling Solutions(SRS), the world’s largest electrical and electronics reuse and recycling company, has announced that it has promoted Stephen Phelan to manage its Middle East operations based in Dubai.
Phelan helped set up the operations in the region and was its Operations Manager till April 2014 when he took over as Country Manager before being formally appointed as its Managing Director (MD) in September 2014. As the MD, Phelan will be responsible for the operational, commercial, profit and loss activities for Sims Recycling Solutions in the Middle East region.
Phelan said, “The global trends show that the E-Waste problem is not going away anytime soon. If anything it is only going to get worse. Studies have shown that from 2012 to 2017 volumes are expected to rise by 33 percent. We will be expanding throughout the region in the very near future. We have received requests from organisations wishing to partner with us across the region and I am currently visiting the different countries to evaluate these possibilities.”
The volume of material received for processing year on year by SRS has increased significantly. With the increase in volumes, the company has hired and trained more staff and introduced a second shift into its operations to double capacity and cope with the demand.
“I expect us to outgrow our facility within the next 12 to 18 months,” added Phelan. “I am now looking at plots of land where we can build a much larger facility similar to our international sites that will include automated shredding and separation technologies.”
Phelan is a former IT specialist at FedEx and General Manager of the electronics division at Enviroserve, he then started his own E-Waste recycling business (Akhdar FZCO) in 2009 and sold it to a publicly traded multi-national organisation (Sims Recycling Solutions) in 2012.
He set up and managed the Middle East’s first national recycling campaign (Envirophone) in The United Arab Emirates. This was in conjunction with UAE Ministry of Environment & Water, the TRA (Telecoms Regulatory Authority), Etisalat, du and several other corporate sponsors. The campaign was set up to prevent hundreds of thousands of mobile phones ending up in land fill and was so successful that it won the Lloyds TSB small business of the year award for Enviroserve in 2007.
