Partnership with Napco National
The branch will be located in Neom, ‘The Line’, in Saudi Arabia. Neom is a new project developed by the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to the Neom website, Mohammed bin Salman stated: ‘It is a city of a million residents with a length of 170 km that preserves 95% of nature inside Neom, it will be zero cars, zero streets and zero carbon emissions’ (Neom, n.d.).
Neom will provide a new version of urban sustainability powered by 100% renewable energy. Moreover, the city will embrace environmental responsibility initiatives that develop sustainable and regenerative development practices (Neom, n.d.).
ALBAIK is a fast food restaurant that offers fried food; therefore, it uses a huge amount of cooking oil. Similar to Macdonald’s and KFC, it recycles the cooking oil waste and turns it into fuel (biodiesel) and electricity (The Guardian, 2013; Business Today, 2018). ALBAIK will reuse the oil waste to generate electricity for the branch in Neom and fuel the trucks of the other ALBAIK branches.
‘Waste-to-energy’ solution
The first circular economy initiative is ‘Green ALBAIK’, which involves opening a new branch of ALBAIK with operations that are 100% environmentally friendly, from reusing the food waste to food packaging and transportation for delivery.
Neom branch
GREEN ALBAIK
Napco National is a local leading manufacturer of plastic raw materials, flexible packaging, paper containers, and consumer products. It is developing a circular economy by recycling plastic waste that is collected from its plant and customers in Saudi Arabia (Napco National, 2017). ALBAIK’s sauce packaging and bags are made of plastic, and other types of packaging are made of paper and aluminium with a paper lid.
