Crack on Clean up
Imagine a forested hill ravaged by bulldozers, or a river running with plastic.
It was sights like these that inspired my latest Brave New Girl guest Maria Abel Karim to gather up her young friends and take it upon themselves to work as a collective to start clearing up their country of Lebanon.
It is so easy to feel that it’s too big a job to tackle, or that’ll it get sorted by someone else.
But when Maria and her friends formed the charity Recycler Donation, they decided if not them who, and if not now, when.
Now they have a boat made from recycled materials collecting rubbish from the river and they have an ongoing campaign for cleaning up.
However they are also trying to educate people into not creating the rubbish in the first place with their mantra to refuse and reuse, and as a last resort to recycle.
When we see a group of young people rolling up their sleeves and deciding the buck stops with them, it must surely inspire us to crack on with making reparations for the planet too.
THE BUCK STOPS WITH US
There’s no longer time to keep kicking the can down the road. Let’s follow Maria’s example and get cracking with The Big Clean-Up.
Maria Abdel Karim is co-founder of Recycler, The Environmental Army, a team of passionate youth working together and creating new sustainable approaches to the waste problem in Lebanon, including recycling waste, doing clean-ups, raising awareness, & using technology & AI for the good of the environment.
Recycler is specialized in solid waste management, environmental education, sustainable innovation and agriculture.
Maria believes that lack of environmental education is making people not take this topic seriously and so therefore they offer quality education to raise the level of awareness among society for a better community.
They work to create a conscious community and achieve the highest waste reduction possible, offering quality education and have clean tech everywhere.
Maria sees success as being:
- a future where there is a letting go of a consumer craving for new
- embracing a ‘waste not want not’ mentality where we get to witness the impact of each and every act we make
- bridging the gap between the environment and humans by taking innovation to another level.
Thanks Maria for your contribution with Recycler and for sharing all the ways that you help both the environment and the people of Lebanon to have a more regenerative and restorative future.
Thanks also for showing us that when we pull together we can be an army working for the fair share and care of people and the planet.
You can find out more about Maria’s work at
and follow them on Instagram @recycler_donation
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