My AD for Banque Libano Francaise "Live Your Ambition" Program

This AD was filmed in 2008 and has been regularly featured on LBC just before the evening news.  Sometimes I go into small grocery shops in Beirut and the grocer looks at me and says: "Mich inta el chab yalli Biyechtighil bil Zbeleh?"  

Waste Expert Gives Lebanon Landfill Alternative

This article was published in the Daily Star Newspaper in November 2011. November 04, 2011 01:35 AM

By Niamh Fleming-Farrell

The Daily Star BEIRUT: Ziad Abichaker’s passion in life is your garbage. For 20 years the environmental and industrial engineer has been dedicated to conceptualizing, designing and developing waste management systems to achieve a zero waste objective. An objective he says, “we are very close to reaching.” Abichaker founded Cedar Environmental to make some pocket money while in his second year of engineering school at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He brought the company home to Lebanon in 1996. Now, 15 years later, Cedar Environmental boasts 10 waste treatment plants across Lebanon, has the capacity to process 46,000 tons of waste annually, produces Vieverte, an organically certified compost, and is concluding the research and development stage of Eco-Board, a durable material made entirely from recycled plastic bags. When this product goes on the market, almost all waste that enters a Cedar Environmental plant will exit in a different and usable form. Cedar Environmental plants are founded on the ethos of local, environmentally friendly and financially sustainable waste treatment. In line with this, their mission demands the elimination of the unnecessary and expensive transportation and storage of trash. “We are going against the trend of centralizing waste management,” Abichaker says. “What we are saying as a working model for the very near future is every community can have its own waste management recycling plant. “These centers are very close to the communities so, you can [collect the garbage] on a … daily basis. You don’t have to compact; you don’t have to use the compactor trucks, which are prohibitively expensive.” Vieverte is an organically certified compost. What has enabled Abichaker’s company to comfortably process waste close to communities is its development of technology to minimize the odor waste produces. “People don’t want recycling plants near their communities mainly because of bad smells,” he says. But by having the composting take place inside a steel drum and accelerating the process by adding an enzymatic and bacterial preparation, which reduces composting time from 90 days to just three, the odors generally associated with waste treatment plants are avoided. Currently Cedar Environmental plants receive commingled municipal waste, which is separated on site. Composting recycles the organic matter; while at present inorganic material is processed for recycling elsewhere. “We shred the plastic, we bale the water bottles, we pack the glass bottles. So you have a facility there that treats all your garbage and sends very little to the landfill,” Abichaker says. “Even clothes, we have a very neat application for them,” he says. “We are baling them and we’re going to use them as fencing.” “We have no proper recycling of textiles [in Lebanon],” he adds. Soon, however, Cedar Environmental hopes to launch its building material, Eco-Board as a second fully recycled, marketable product. Abichaker modestly claims that Eco-Board – made from shredding and repacking everything from chip bags to flip-flops into a one-centimeter thick solid board – was “just a consequence of building recycling plants.” However, he says, it means “now we can very confidently go to municipalities and say, we can build a recycling plant for your garbage and we don’t want a landfill.” The next step is to build a major plant for Eco-Board’s production. “[In] 2012 we’re going to be on the market extensively. We’re going to replace a lot of stuff with boards made from plastic bags,” Abichaker assures. In fact, he already has an order for the new boards – from a company that will use them instead of wooden panels as fencing on a construction site. Other Eco-Board products in development include bus-stop shelters, tables, benches, reinforced wooden pallets, bins and prefabricated houses. Eco-Board will come with a lifetime guarantee, with damaged boards replaced and no longer functional boards recycled and reconstituted into a new board, Abichaker says. The environmentalist cannot stress enough the suitability of initiatives like his company’s to Lebanon. “The landfill model has really exhausted all its favorable arguments,” he says citing the capital as an example. “Beirut is on the verge of a major catastrophe when it comes to waste treatment. Naameh landfill is alarmingly running out of space.” He points out that in “Beirut and Mount Lebanon 2,500 tons [of waste] per day” is collected and “only 300 get composted or sorted, all the others go as is to the Naameh landfill.” “It’s a terrible loss and a terrible expense,” he adds. The alternative he offers is ideal because it requires relatively little space, minimizes storage and transportation costs, doesn’t inconvenience households – he asks only that refuse be separated into organic and inorganic bins – and is affordable for municipalities. Abichaker’s ideal is to service four or five municipalities together by one Cedar Environmental plant. “We prefer [to service] 100,000 people [per plant],” he says. “These guys would generate 50 tons [of waste] per day. We have a small piece of land, not exceeding 10,000 square meters [and] we build a recycling plant there. “[The] service … is paid [for] by residential unit. It is just about LL6,000 per household per month. So this is what we’re telling [the municipalities], ‘Hey listen … [it’s] peanuts.’” Although the company operates just 10 plants at present – one in Beirut, one in Jbeil and eight in south Lebanon – Abichaker says: “Now [the municipalities] are listening to us more. They believe in our model.” By 2020, the entrepreneur, with a smile, says he hopes to have 100 operational plants, but for now he’s just proud of his accomplishments. “We are certified for organic agriculture and for us this is huge. This is what we have been saying all along: If you change your perspective or if you shift the paradigm you are using now for waste collection and treatment, you can take a major problem, which was a major pollutant, and you can turn it into a high-grade, high-value-added product.” And while he may spend his days up to his armpits in other people’s trash, for two decades Abichaker has had what most people only ever dream of: a true love for his job. “For me it’s more than work, it’s a passion,” he says. “You know people complain on Monday mornings; I’m anxious on a Sunday night just to get to the plant Monday morning.”

MAKING PRODUCT FROM WASTE PROFITABLY.

The following is an article about Cedar Environmental published in 2011 GREEN ECONOMY report of the Arab Forum for Environment and development.

Cedar Environmental, an environmental engineering firm in Lebanon, has eschewed landfills for the disposing of waste and has pioneered innovative processes for recycling municipal solid waste since 1999 using its own locally developed methods.  The company builds its own composting rotating drums, which ferment organic waste aerobically and reduce the odors to a minimum.

Controlling odors enables Cedar Environmental to operate composting and recycling facilities closer to the communities it serves where waste originates, thus reducing transportation costs and avoiding the logistics of hauling over long distances to a landfill.

Cedar Environmental operates waste management and treatment facilities in a closed area, whereby 95% of the received municipal solid waste is recycled into commercially sellable products. The company’s goal is to reach “zero waste”.

After sorting, approximately 25% of the waste is sorted by weight and is collected for direct marketing as recyclable materials such as metals, paper, cardboard, glass, and some types of plastic. The organic matter, accounting for about 55% of the total waste, is digested aerobically in rotating drums and converted into a marketable organic fertilizer product. The remaining 15% of materials, such as cloth, shoes, and low quality plastic are separated and recycled, or utilized in specific applications. Only 5% of the original waste remains and is sent to a landfill for safe disposal.

The marketable products made by composting the organic components of the waste include:

• Certified organic compost, which is sifted and homogenized to bring it to a uniform structure. It is 99% free of foreign matter. The compost is then matured and packed in 20-liter bags, labeled, and sold in supermarkets and flower shops. Revenues from compost sales allow the company to charge municipalities less for the transport and treatment of their solid waste.

• In 2005, the company adapted its Dynamic Composting Technology to slaughterhouse waste. About 6 tons of digestive tracts, horns, hoofs, and bones of slaughtered animals used to be dumped in rivers or burned in the backyard of the slaughterhouse daily. The company uses composting drums to mix slaughterhouse waste with fish waste, tobacco waste, and coffee roasting waste (which were all land-filled).The waste mixture is then processed to generate a final compost product that qualifies as a high-grade organic fertilizer. This product is now sold primarily to organic certified farmers at half the price of imported certified organic fertilizers.
  
• During the composting cycle of the combined slaughterhouse-fish-tobacco-coffee waste, the leachate is collected into fermentation tanks, oxidized, and aerobically fermented for two weeks. When it was originally analyzed in the laboratory it proved to be loaded with 30 different micronutrients, while meeting heavy metal specification standards.This new product is marketed as a liquid fertilizer concentrate to farmers, who can dilute by 100 times with water. The diluted liquid can then be used in drip irrigation or by spraying directly on plants’ foliar structure.

• For home and small garden use, the company introduced a 1.5-liter liquid fertilizer bottle. The liquid fertilizer concentrate, produced from the slaughterhouse waste process, is diluted to safe usage levels, bottled, labeled, and marketed along with the organic fertilizer in supermarkets and flower shops.
  
• Aside from organic products, Cedar Environmental has been involved in research to recycle plastic bags and other plastics that are not currently being recycled such as plastic cups, plastic dishes, cutlery, compact disks (CDs), toothbrushes, and toothpaste tubes.  The company has developed a process in which all plastic materials are shredded and turned into a thick flat board, which is dubbed “eco-board.” 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The ecoboard is used in the making of fencing for outdoor construction sites, shelves, and outdoor furniture such as benches and tables. The company is currently scaling up this process to be able to produce these boards on an industrial scale for commercial sale.