As part of its commitment to advancing responsible business practices and supporting the UAE’s net zero ambitions, DMCC’s Sustainability Hub recently convened industry leaders, entrepreneurs and experts for a community-focused event titled “Innovating Supply Chains: Practical Strategies and Insights”.
A Platform for Collaboration and Insight
The DMCC Sustainability Hub, co-created by DMCC and powered by C3 – Companies Creating Change, brings together industry experts, academia, entrepreneurs, and DMCC members to discuss sustainability-related issues. Each event is designed by DMCC to ensure businesses leave with practical insights they can apply immediately within their operations.
The Hub’s most recent event around supply chains focused on helping companies understand global sustainability standards and translate them into locally relevant solutions. The session opened with an insightful panel discussion led by UAE-based leaders in sustainability and innovation:
- Johanna Salem of Dubai Holding, who moderated the conversation
- Samer Kamal, from Nadeera Tech
- Fawad Ahmed Mian, co-founder of Milenow
- Rohit Majhi, co-founder of Maalexi
Redesigning Supply Chains for Resilience
A consistent insight that emerged throughout the panel is that global supply chains are not ‘broken’ – they simply were not designed for the complexity, volatility and resource pressures of today’s world. Samer Kamal pointed out that waste is a logistics issue, not just an environmental one, while Fawad Mian noted that the waste industry still lacks intelligent, data-driven tools for decision-making. Adding to these points, Rohit Majhi shared how smaller producers are often disadvantaged by opaque, inefficient trade routes and outdated financial mechanisms. What became clear from the panel is that sustainability cannot scale unless it is commercially viable.
The Circular Economy in Action
The event then featured interactive simulation led by Rana Hajirasouli, founder of the B Corp-certified startup The Surpluss. Through her Industrial Symbiosis Game, participants were challenged to reimagine waste not as a burden, but as a resource to be redeployed.
Working in teams, participants navigated a high-pressure scenario where they had to redesign supply chains in real-time and build interdependent systems of exchange. The session demonstrated how the principles of circular economy can be applied, even in highly complex operational environments.
This exercise challenged participants to question whether waste is truly waste, or simply a resource in the wrong place. She reminded us that global supply chains were built for speed, scale, and linearity - but in a world of increasing resource constraints, that model is beginning to collapse. What’s needed now are supply chains that are adaptive, circular and built for resilience.
Shifting the Sustainability Mindset
The event highlighted the power of focusing beyond compliance alone, encouraging opportunity-driven thinking and reflecting the core mission of the DMCC Sustainability Hub to act as a convening platform that facilitates learning, dialogue and innovation across sectors.
The Hub continues to serve as a unique ecosystem within the UAE, designed to support DMCC member companies on their ESG journeys through knowledge sharing, community building, and practical implementation support.