Sustainable Consumerism

The sustainable consumerism project focuses on the role a community can play in reducing the power of consumerism. Seeing that Bourj Hammoud is located next to the Karantina garbage mountain and Beirut river and that its inhabitants possess a strong sense of community, it was chosen as a perfect environment to introduce a recycling system that can open the gate to a smarter way of handling garbage. The biggest problem Lebanon and this city face is the extensive use of plastic bags. Plastic bags can take up to a 1000 years to degrade and can be ingested by sea animals. No system is available for recycling them in Lebanon. That is why, the main idea behind this project is to create a plastic bag bank, where inhabitants can throw away their plastic bags so they can be recollected by the municipality and handed to Bourj Hammoud artisans who will create different objects out of these bags and sell them. This will be a great opportunity for spreading awareness on smart consumer habits and on the environment. It will also create a system that can be replicated in other areas of Lebanon where plastic bags can be reused in a smarter way to benefit the community both ecologically and economically. The sustainable consumerism project is in collaboration with the YMCA.

“DESMEEM: Rethinking Design through Cross-Cultural Collaboration” is an international multidisciplinary social design project that has been developed in Beirut for the past few months with European and Lebanese designers and architects. As a research-led initiative, all the projects revolve around themes that are of high social or environmental significance to Lebanon. These include urban space, energy/electricity, sustainable consumerism, creative education, disability, migrant workers integration, personal finance, and gender/LGBT rights. This project is one of the eight that was created by this process.