“Nuqat” Speaker to Arabs: Get Waste, Food Security Savvy ASAP!

We don’t have the luxury of fiddling in the Arab world, we’re drowning in trash that we’re not recycling, and may well face food insecurity if we don’t get our act together, but there are solutions in sight, so time is of the essence.

“Nature always recycles everything and reuses it,” said Ziad Abichaker at the 10th conference of Nuqat (points in Arabic), a non-profit organization for cultural development in the (Arabian) Gulf Cooperation Council and Middle East/North Africa region. “One of the people I admire greatly is (architect/futurist) Buckminster Fuller, who said ‘Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.’”

Ziad Abichaker defines the seven categories of waste (Abu-Fadil)

Sadly, much of what we eat, use and discard ends up in landfills, incinerated, underwater or dumped in a very unsustainable fashion causing much harm and losing potential value, he told this year’s Nuqat event dubbed “State of the Elastic Mind: A New Mindset for Old Barriers.”

So his solutions presented at the three-day gathering focused on art, innovation, technology, architecture, design and photography, were to recycle, reuse and become urban farmers.

“Anyone working on creating a zero waste society should know that waste falls into seven categories: Household and yard, slaughterhouse, industrial, medical and pharmaceutical, wastewater, electronic, and, construction and debris,” he said, adding there should be seven plans to process these various types.

Abichaker, CEO of Cedar Environmental, an environmental and engineering organization, complained of a rigid mindset in handling waste disposal, like insisting on centralized municipal recycling facilities that have exacerbated pollution, and called on conferees to adopt an elastic mentality that would provide sustainable and profitable solutions.

Abichaker's sorting models (Abu-Fadil)

I decided to zero in on this session because of its critical importance to people in the Middle East/North Africa region, but particularly to Lebanon, Abichaker’s troubled homeland, where a two-month-plus revolution, economic crisis, lingering trash disaster, and potential food shortage threaten to unravel the very fabric of the country.

“The (decentralized smaller) model we’re working on means every group, not exceeding 50,000 population, can have their own facility and these facilities can work on the basis of zero waste,” he said.

Zero waste means nothing is thrown into the ground, particularly plastics that can take up to five centuries to decompose, but that garbage is sorted and sent to plants in various communities where organic waste (food making up 70%-80% of it) is composted.

Abichaker, a Rutgers University alumnus and multi-disciplinary engineer specialized in building municipal recycling facilities on the communal level, argued that leftover food, peels and other parts of organic waste can, and should, be used to re-feed the soil.

“If we follow good practices, if we respect the trash we collect, we appreciate its value, we can produce high quality Class A+ compost, according to EU standards,” to use in organic or biological farming as all Arab countries import organic compost, he said.

Waste stream analysis (Abu-Fadil)

Why all the fuss about decomposed organic matter? Because by recycling these nutrient rich materials, one can use compost as fertilizer and soil conditioner to make plants grow.

Abichaker said the Arab world will suffer from climate change – water stress being a particular growing risk - with desert Gulf countries expected to be seriously affected - so their salvation is to produce compost from food waste that can then be used to make food grow in the desert and elsewhere with proper drip irrigation.

He’s already put his words to practice. Abichaker hasn’t bought bread from a bakery since 2013 thanks to compost produced in his firm’s plants, which goes into growing wheat in Lebanon.

Other major projects include work by a certified organic farmer who produces tomatoes, strawberries and grapes without relying on sprays or chemicals in the ground.  

Abichaker is also interested in non-organic waste like plastic and glass.

“We can take water bottles and turn them into dacron fibers,” he said pointing to a small plastic bottle in his hand and projected slides showing how recycled plastics can be used in food production.

Given plastic’s ubiquity and our inability to ban it altogether, even if we wanted to, Abichaker asked the conferees to stretch their minds and think of how it can be utilized.

The potential of recycling in Lebanon (Abu-Fadil)

“It took us four years to understand what this was all about and how it behaves,” he said about the seven types of plastic. “We then produced eco-boards from single-use plastics.”

The boards, for which Abichaker’s team has found promising marketable applications, are solid, last 500 years, are completely waterproof, don’t rot, don’t wear out, and each slab is composed of about 4,430 supermarket bags.

They turned them into perforated walls holding a mix of red soil, compost and dry, ground agricultural waste on which they planted a whole range of fruits, vegetables and flowers in streets, urban areas, and particularly rooftops.

A second commercial application Abichaker’s team worked on was branded street recycling bins sponsored by major firms to encourage people in Lebanon to dispose of waste in such receptacles.

The national beer company sponsored the bins for bottles while a mineral water firm backed the bins for plastic bottles and a bank undertook promotion of bins for paper and cardboard. He still needs a sponsor for bins to hold cans.

“We started putting them in Beirut streets; we have about 17 locations and every truck that collects weighs what it collects from every location, and we started sharing this information with the public,” he said.

Over a 15-month period, his group had recycled a million plastic bottles to prevent having them dumped in Beirut’s notorious Bourj Hammoud landfill. They also saved the equivalent of 385 trees by collecting paper and cardboard.

Abichaker’s third application, “Beirut Planting Roofs,” the title of a video on his YouTube channel, was inspired from the team’s planting on the rim of a building and has led to a new wave of vertical agriculture.

They created a structure in which they can plant 200 buds in a square meter, with the same mix of red soil, compost and ground dry waste and in some cases added cellulose fiber from industrial waste, like Kleenex tissues, which they discovered absorbs six times its weight.

“We included 10% in the mix so that whenever we irrigated, this cellulose substance would absorb the liquid so that we wouldn’t need to water a lot when it’s hot,” he explained. “We planted all sorts of greens, particularly lettuce.”

The first project they undertook for commercial application targeted an all-female catering company at the Burj El Barajneh Camp in Beirut called Soufra (table in Arabic).

The women planted atop their roof and used the produce in their catering business. When production exceeded demand, they bartered the lettuce for other products they needed.

Rooftop farming to solve the food crisis (Abu-Fadil)

"Most of my work today is spent trying to create rooftop farms in Beirut, particularly since we’re foreseeing hard times ahead in Lebanon,” Abichaker said.

I asked him what impact too much rooftop agriculture can have on older buildings in Beirut and Lebanon given their possible structural weaknesses from age, or as a result of damage from the 1975-90 civil war.

“Before we decide to start a rooftop farm we study the building structurally to determine how to place the planters’ orientation,” he said. “For irrigation, you can adjust how much you need so you don’t over-irrigate.”

His company is working on a scheme whereby water from air conditioning units in a building is directed to a tank that pumps it to the roof and uses it for irrigation to avoid waste. It's also making trays for these vertical structures so any excess water from over-irrigation can go back and be used again.

“Let us cultivate our garden,” wrote French Enlightenment philosopher Francois Voltaire in his satirical novel Candide about a young, unsophisticated man who, after experiencing many setbacks and disasters – much like what we’re going through with a modern veneer – eventually retires to the simplicity of farm life, and cultivating a garden.

This is the last in a three-part series on the conference. Part one covered a selection of the first day’s sessions and part two examined some of the second day’s proceedings.