Meet Nadine Razzouk, or as I like to call her Nado.

Nado is one of the first people I ever met at AUB. She’s also one the quirkiest and most charmingly happy human beings you can ever encounter. Nado is also a graphic design student, soon to graduate and grace the world with her impeccable talents and keen eye for details.

Nado & Mohamed Olaymi & Lama Shehadeh, three brilliant graphic designers, sat together and managed to come up with an ingenious idea to fight littering in Lebanon. If you’re anything like me in that regard, you get infuriated whenever you see – for lack of a better word – shitheads throwing used tissues, coke cans, cigarette boxes, etc… on Lebanon’s streets and not giving a second look as to what they left behind.

I remember when I had French friends over a few years back. Their main comments regarding Lebanon can be summed up in one sentence: “One of the most gorgeous countries. But it’s also very dirty.”

And I can’t agree more. If you ever drove around slowly, you can’t but notice the sidewalks, the sides of the roads, the highways… everything is just filled with litter. And people seem not to care that they live in filth.

Here comes a team of AUB graphic designers and their idea: Metel Ma Shelta.

The campaign’s description is as follows:

As we were strolling around the beautiful streets of Hamra, we witness a man pulling his arm outside the window of his car to throw a tissue paper. What upset us the most was that this was happening across Lebanon and we weren’t able to do anything about it.We, as graphic designers decided to use what we’re best at (our witty minds and shiny tools) to visually express our frustration regarding the littering issue in Lebanon.Since people nowadays are immune to flyers, we thought of creating something irresistible that no one can overlook. Mmmm, so what can be irresistible to every individual on this planet…That’s when it hit us like a lightning bolt!
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!We photographed lebanese money and slightly altered the colors and design so that this project won’t be mistaken for forgery (something that was holding us back from going through with this campaign).

We’re well aware that many campaigns have been done regarding this issue, but if Metel Ma Shelta reaches out to at least 1 individual, we’ll be more than glad to have helped somewhere somehow.

Now lets clean Lebanon 10 thou at a time 🙂

The arabic on the right translates to: Similarly to how you picked this up, you can pick up the litter off the street

I wish them the best of luck in their campaign and I hope it becomes very successful and gains enough traction to hopefully pass an anti-littering law that would punish those who litter by getting them to pay ridiculous amounts of money.

Let’s keep Lebanon clean. We owe it at least that much. This is their Facebook page.