What do you get if you mix camels and a cement plant? Well, based on an initiative in the United Arab Emirates- a potential new fuel source. Jacob Greaves reports.

This could be the new face of the UAE's drive to reduce waste. Camels, or rather their excrement - being used in cement production. And it's all being pioneered in the northern emirate of Ras al-Khaimah.

JACOB GREAVES CGTN "The thinking behind the initiative is to make better use of what was once largely a waste product destined for landfill and it's fair to say it's fairly plentiful in these parts, each one of these camels can produce between 8-15 kilograms of manure a day and there's estimated to be around 10,000 such camels in the emirate alone."

After being bagged up on farms like this, the excrement is taken to a nearby cement factory for blending with coal to power the plants' boiler.

The government-run scheme began with the local waste management agency, but cement producers could see the financial gains.

SONIA YTUARTE NASSER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR RAS AL-KHAIMAH WASTE MANAGEMENT AGENCY "In a cement plant, 45% of their cost is energy, you know what they're paying for their coal. For us, right now we're not charging them for it because I'm just offsetting the transportation costs, it costs me just as much to haul it to the landfill as it does to haul it up to them, so my cost is the same. But I'm having this cost avoidance of landfilling something forever and having to take care of it forever. So at the same time what we agreed in the MOU is that we will share our costs, because it also costs them extra to process the camel waste."

After some trial and error, the Gulf Cement Company created a blend that allows the cement oven to burn at the all-important 1400 degrees Celsius. That's around one part dung to nine parts coal. Since May last year the factory has been using 50 tonnes of camel manure a day. But there's also a sense of UAE traditional thrown into the mix.

MOHAMED AHMED ALI EBRAHIM, GENERAL MANAGER GULF CEMENT COMPANY "We heard from our grandfathers and grandmothers, there were some kind of manures, it was utilised in that time as energy and they burn it to warm the things, even to cook, but we were not thinking that we would utilise the camel manure for the cement factories."

The impact on this factory's emissions are relatively small - coal is still king. It does mean they're using less of the fossil fuel; swapping some coal shipped from South Africa for locally made dung. But crucially the scheme is part of an ambitious government goal to divert 75% of all waste from landfill by 2021.

With that target in mind, there are plans to boost camel excrement collection and expand to other cement factories. And that could be just the beginning.

In their bid to reduce landfill, the Waste Management Agency has dubbed this the "low hanging fruit". Jacob Greaves for CGTN, in Ras al-Khaimah.