The workshop provided practical tips to businesses on how to reduce their waste in the midst of the environmental crisis that the country is currently witnessing, and was given by the guest speaker: Ziad Abichaker- CEO, Cedar Environmental L.L.C.
Ziad is a multidisciplinary engineer who specializes in building Municipal Recycling Facilities on the communal level going against the trend of a central Mega recycling Plant. While doing research at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA his team developed a technology to accelerate the composting cycle of organic waste in an odorless manner to produce high grade fertilizer. After returning to Lebanon in 1996, Ziad started Cedar Environmental, an environmental & industrial engineering organization that aims to build recycling plants to produce organically certified fertilizers and leave no waste material to be disposed of, but instead recycled into a new form of product to be used again and again. Most municipalities in Lebanon and the middle east cannot afford to buy recycling plants, so Ziad worked out a three way contract where local banks give his company soft loans to build the recycling facilities and municipalities pay only for the service of recycling/composting in comfortable monthly installments not exceeding 5 US Dollars per household per month. Recently, Ziad and his engineering team, after four years of research, developed a new technology which transforms plastic bags into solid plastic panels used in the outdoors to replace wooden and steel panels. Currently, they are transforming that technology from using fossil fuels to generate the required energy to biomass a renewable energy source. He is the recipient of an American Society of Agricultural Engineers (ASAE) design award in 1993 for his design linking municipal waste management to agriculture. In 2001, he received the Ford Motor Company Environmental & Conservation award for the Middle East. He was named Arab Social Innovator for 2011 by Synergos institute in New York City, USA.