Ziad Abichaker is a multi-disciplinary engineer who specializes in building Municipal Recycling Facilities on the communal level going against the trend of a centralized recycling plant. While doing research at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, his team developed the 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 and industrial engineering organization that aims to build recycling plants to produce organically certified fertilizers. The plants do not produce waste material to be disposed of because the waste is recycled into a new form of product to be used again. Most municipalities in Lebanon and the Middle East cannot afford to buy recycling plants, so Ziad arranged for local banks to give his company soft loans to build the recycling facilities and municipalities will only pay for the service of recycling/composting in comfortable monthly installments not exceeding US$5 per household per month.
Recently, Ziad and his engineering team developed new technology to transform plastic bags into solid plastic panels used in the outdoors to replace wooden and steel panels. Currently, they are looking into replacing the role of fossil fuels in this technology with a renewable energy source.