Cigarette surfboard shames Lebanese smokers

BEIRUT — “I hate it, it smells like an ashtray,” Paul Abbas, Lebanon’s only surfboard maker, told Al-Monitor as he passed thousands of used cigarette butts meticulously placed to form the base of a stand-up-paddle board at his workshop in Lebanon’s seaside town of Byblos.

Joslin Kehdy, the founder of Recycle Lebanon and co-creator of the ‘cigarette board,’ offered a different opinion while grabbing handfuls of butts from a bag. “I don’t mind it the smell … because I have been picking cigarettes up a lot, people will see me in the street and say ‘I have cigarettes for you,'" he told Al-Monitor. "I actually don’t smoke, which shocks people who ask me 'how can you handle the smell,' but we are handling so much trash in Lebanon that I don’t notice.”