Biography
Georges Bitar is the 2022 IEEE Entrepreneurship Impact Award recipient.
Georges Bitar and his social business Live Love Recycle have made recycling accessible to an entire country by digitizing the waste management sector.
Bitar said, “In 2015, I decided to come back to Lebanon and that was the time of a great garbage crisis. This wasn’t the Beirut I wanted. It’s my city. It’s the city where I was born and spent 99% of my life, so I didn’t want it to be full of garbage like it was. And instantly, without even thinking about it, without even thinking of doing an enterprise or even a social enterprise, I decided to do something about this situation. I either had the option to go on the street and protest or find a solution. I wanted to recycle, so I put all my efforts into this project. Live Love Recycle was born.”
In 2015, Lebanon was passing through a huge garbage crisis, as the streets were literally flooded with garbage. Georges Bitar wanted to help Lebanon find a long-term and sustainable solution to this problem. That is how Georges got the idea of Live Love Recycle. He was in Mozambique at that time and decided to come back to Lebanon and create Live Love Recycle, which is a crowdsourced platform that links together all the recycling stakeholders to create synergies between them and improve their efficiencies through a mobile application. Live Love Recycle received some funds from a German NGO and started working in 2017. Now they currently offer a free and reliable recyclables collection service at the client’s convenience with just one click.
The initiative is based on a mobile application that allows users to order on-demand pick-up requests, learn tips on how to reduce, reuse, and recycle, know how many kilograms of waste they are recycling, and get incentives on requests made to recycle. In the meantime, the driver’s app identifies the best route from the client’s location to the recycling facility to save time and pollute less. They recycle paper/cardboard, plastic/nylon, and cans/metal. They have recently increased our list of collected items to include: glass, electronics waste, used oil, clothes, batteries, and more… 
Since the start of the operation, Live Love Recycle has created 436 job opportunities for men and women, 20,000 people benefit from our service, and they have managed to save more than 500 Tons of waste from going into our landfills and seas. They believe that step by step, Live Love Recycle will be able to cover all regions in Lebanon, thus inciting a large number of Lebanese citizens to recycle and decrease their waste consumption.
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Live Love Recycle – a 100% social solution to waste crisis in Beirut [EN]
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