Episode 01: Note from the General Manager and CEO

I am a youth environmental engineer, social entrepreneur and activist. My passion, my expertise, is combining equitable access to resources with ecosystem justice and restoration. My whole professional journey led me to fully dedicate myself to the concept of sustainability. I focus on understanding the complexity of diverse contexts and restructuring problems as the first step to promoting resilient solutions. My deep interest in understanding these multifaceted issues while tackling urgent problems for the most vulnerable is what grounds my professional and activist work, to both apprehend problems and take action towards solutions.

ReFuse made me transform my vision into a tangible mission - impossible only if alone. My startup, my dream, came true, uniting a 4 headed co-founders’ team, mixing engineering with urban sociology expertise. Now, this team keeps multiplying my mission. With a critical eye: challenging the status quo by creative, ethical irreverence. We are Lebanon’s reps for the MENA Youth for Climate Action network, part of Lebanon’s Waste Consortium, and Social Entrepreneurs of the Switchers Community. We shared our thoughts and experience at the COP27’s Conference of Youth and at COP28. We take pride and expand through networks. The ReFuse Generation Campaign created our own, building a working group with UN Agencies, INGOs, and local actors to overcome environmental injustices as informal waste picking.

Have you ever met Samir, the 8-year-old Syrian Refugee Waste Picker scavenging for recyclables around Beirut? This dehumanising picture, such an undignified reality, perfectly summarises how ReFuse is tackling a Lebanese - yet international - intersectoral problem across the Global Goals. We fight to eradicate poverty (SDG1.1), providing contract-based jobs and training for people in underserved communities. Our team speaks a world of languages, from Lebanese to Syrian, Armenian, Kurdish, Sudanese and more. We further act by promoting our reward-based sorting, ReFuse’s income-generating services (SDG1.4). We work to erase informal jobs and child labour in this sector (SDG8.7), daily fighting the exploitative practices of Lebanon’s waste mafia, opening recyclables collection points to outsmart this modern slavery system. We reduce the release of waste into the air, water and soil (SDG12.4) by diverting 24 streams to the recycling industry, turning them into secondary raw materials. We tackle dense neighbourhoods lacking services to minimise adverse impacts on human health and the environment (SDG3.9). We engage youth, continuously spread awareness, and provide technical consultancies to substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse (SDG12.5). Through clean-ups and integrated solid waste management solutions, we contribute daily to creating more sustainable cities and communities, cutting litter and promoting environmental actions (SDG11.6).

As an environmental and social activist, as a youth leader, I’m tired of only fighting for behavioural change. Showing people their wrong acts. Inspiring them to change. I want to contribute to changing a wrong system. I want to be heard where decisions are taken - at the source. I want to make polluters decision-makers accountable.

Through ReFuse.

I vow to actively listen and learn from the experiences and examples of peers.

Learn, cooperate, inspire. Three key ingredients of transformative leadership.