Founder
and CEO
Cedar
Environmental Lebanon
Ziad is a
multi-disciplinary 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 recently named Arab Social Innovator for 2011 by Synergos
institute in New York City, USA.
