I started developing my passion for environmental and social justice as a teenager growing up in Cairo, Egypt, one of the most polluted cities in the world. I remember visiting the “Zaballeen” in Mokattam, a village just outside Cairo. Mokattam is home to an incredible community of roughly 60,000 entrepreneurial garbage workers, largely composed of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, who have recycled Cairo’s waste for decades. I learned there firsthand how governments, corporations, and cultural forces often overlap to create tangled webs of environmental injustice.
From that time on, I decided to pursue possibilities for people to work together to develop environmentally sustainable solutions for a more just, equitable world. This drove me to where I am today, fighting to end plastic pollution by holding corporations accountable with the global Break Free From Plastic movement.
