Blue Cycle for Life

I am Elias Zaidan, mechanical engineer from Beirut – LEBANON.

I have 8+ years of professional experience in production & management from initial idea to completion, and handled various high scaled projects in the stainless steel & black steel domains.

Over the years, along with achieving my engineering degree, I have developed a wide range of applicable skills, including problem solving, organizational skills, excellent communication skills, delegating & allocating tasks, teamwork and projects planning. I have demonstrable ability in delivering substantial projects on time & within the specified budget, and would bring those abilities to bear in your institution. 

I am also a dreamer, and I hope I could serve my country with many innovative ideas, in parallel with my multiple social activities, helping poor families and charity organizations.

Our recycling project is committed to solve the following problems in Lebanon:

1- Pollution and the high rate of diseases resulting from it

2- Economic crisis, high rate of unemployment, inflation…

3- Bad conditions of Lebanese roads

4- High price of energy used for domestic heating

5- High price of imported raw materials and the products locally made from these materials.

Our project will consist of:

a) Collecting recyclable materials, reducing the garbage dumped in landfills.

b) Creating new jobs specially for women

c) Recycling glass and using it in asphalt paving

d) Recycling agriculture waste into biomass heating briquette

e) Using the recyclable waste into production of raw materials to make useful products for agriculture

We will be helping humanity by

1) Creating new jobs and increasing economic security

2) Reducing pollution

3) Preserving natural resources

The main problem we are solving is the pollution:

We are suffering for many years from air, water and soil pollution, with the absence of sustainable strategy from the recent governments.

Our groundwater and rivers are contaminated, and this water is used for irrigation, so we are consuming poisonous water, for this reason we have a high rate of cancer patients and death.

There is absence of glass recycling in Lebanon, with thousands of tons damped in landfills without treatment.

In October 2019, there were fires in almost all Lebanon, and the agriculture abandoned waste was one of the main factors of the outbreak.

The mentioned problems are affecting all the Lebanese people, and contribute to the global pollution with the negative side effects on all humanity.

Our project will consist of 3 connected projects:

A-“Blue Cycle for life” recycling project:

1) Raising awareness in schools, universities, municipalities, social media… about the benefits of sorting of recycling

2) Collecting the recyclable materials, making useful products for agriculture, and selling bales of these materials to local industries as a raw materials

B-“Blue Glass”:

1) Collecting the glass and the dumped glass in landfills

2) Recycling the glass to be ready for use in asphalt paving

3) Collaborating with the government to repair Lebanese roads

C- “Eco-Briquette” (an interesting project was made in Lebanon by the European Union)

1) Collecting the agriculture waste

2) Make Biomass fuel, to be used for domestic heating

3) Selling these Eco-briquettes for poor families at low price 

Being involved in many charity actions, we are facing a huge increase of poverty, unemployment, disease, with the absence of the government in helping poor people in many fields.

We will try to create new jobs for the poor people to be able to live with dignity and provide food for their children, reduce the death rate caused by pollution, and providing biomass fuel for them to be warm in winter especially for the ones living in mountains.

As a citizen living in Beirut, we are suffering from the bad smell coming from the landfill in summer, (we can’t even open the windows due to the bad smell), and in parallel, the economic crisis is getting worse and severe, lot of people lost their jobs, garbage everywhere on the streets, everyone is complaining from the high price of raw materials due to inflation…

With all the previous reasons and more, I had decided that we have to do something, and we had made researches and studies for 1 year for this project. This will be a turning point project for our country.

First of all it started with my love for my country, I was so sad seeing that my country is full of garbage, and imagine the scene of the swimming garbage in the street of Beirut in winter (you can see it on YouTube), it something so emotional to me to see one of the most beautiful country in the world like a huge landfill.

In parallel, I am involved in charity actions helping poor people, and the number of poor people Is increasing in a way we can’t control it, so I was always insisting to not only provide food for the poor ones, we have to find jobs, so they can work and earn money for their families.

And last, I am passionate with my career, mechanical engineering, working in production field, industries… I like finding innovative ideas , and the 3 recycling projects were a part from my engineering ideas and researches.

I have 8+ years of professional experience in production & management from initial idea to completion, and handled various high scaled projects in the stainless steel & black steel domains.

Over the years, along with achieving my engineering degree, I have developed a wide range of applicable skills, including problem solving, organizational skills, excellent communication skills, delegating & allocating tasks, teamwork and projects planning. I have demonstrable ability in delivering substantial projects on time & within the specified budget, and would bring those abilities to bear in your institution. 

In my last job position as a project manager, I was in charge of all the operations in the workshop, with an hourly problem solving issues: I had a team of 10 workers in the workshop, and 10 in the construction sites, and I had to solve all the technical, manufacturing, installation problems, in parallel to my engineering work in the workshop. I was living in a pressure ambiance at the workshop for 4 continuous years, being at the same time the site engineer, the workshop engineer, and operations engineer, which gave me a high perseverance skills, and ability to overcome many obstacles I might confront.

I am a volunteer with a Lebanese religious charity NGO named Mission de vie (www.missiondevie.org), a Maronite congregation that started in 1993 with a Patriarchal right, which one of its objectives is to provide the free of charge services of the poorest among the poor without any discrimination in gender, race or religion. The aim of this company is to manage the activities set by the volunteers, to offer them jobs in order to stay in Lebanon, and to support the congregation through the service of the poorest among the poor. And I am in charge of the families volunteers with Mission de Vie

Our project is a national project, so it will be serving all the lebanese people

We mainly have problems in funding, to be able to get all the machines that we want for the 3 recycling projects

We are contacting all the organizations that might get us the funding