Ziad Abi Chaker & Maya Nehme

Ziad Abi Chaker

Ziad is a multi-disciplinary engineer specialized in building Municipal Recycling Facilities going against the trend of central Mega recycling Plants.

Ziad started Cedar Environmental in 1996, an environmental & industrial engineering organization.

Ziad and his team developed a new technology which transforms plastic bags into solid plastic panels, dubbed ECO-BOARD and have won in 2013 the International Energy Globe Award.

In February 2014, he was awarded by the World CSR Congress the Green Future Leadership Award.

Maya Nehme

Dr. Maya Nehme is the director of the Lebanon Reforestation Initiative (LRI), a Lebanese NGO that aims at conserving and expanding Lebanon’s forests and landscapes through a community-based approach and by means of public-private partnerships.

She is an agricultural engineer with a Ph.D. in forest entomology (forest insects) from Penn State University.

She has been at LRI since 2010 and as has been serving as its director since 2015.