Episode 22 Bassam Huneidi – The Argeileh Project

We talk to entrepreneur and designer Bassam Huneidi, about his Argeileh Project.

Bassam is a circular economy designer and strategist, who helps businesses prepare for the future by designing products, services and strategies that are economically viable and avoid harm to the environment. 

Bassam is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. During his career, Bassam has worked at IBM, and has designed services for Virgin, Google and Barclays. Bassam is also the co-founder of Gutface, aiming to revive food fermentation for the modern lifestyle. 

You may not have heard of an Argeileh before…. though you might have heard of a hookah Argeileh is the word used for a hookah in several countries in the Middle East.  It is a single- or multi-stemmed instrument for vaporizing and smoking, tobacco, or flavored cannabis and so on. Charcoal is used to create the heat, and the vapor or smoke is passed through a water basin, before inhalation.  Sometimes they are used at home, and often at cafes, as a shared experience with friends and neighbours.

Bassam worked out that about 11.5 million single-use plastic hoses are used every year in Jordan alone. Extrapolated to the population of the Arab world, that’s 440 million hoses, every year.

We’ll hear how Bassam plans to disrupt one of the biggest traditions in the Arab world with a zero-waste alternative that is better for the environment, cheaper for suppliers and better for public health, while providing the same experience for the user.

The Argeileh Project (or TAP for short) is a subscription-based service that argeileh cafes sign up to. In return, Bassam’s team take the café’s current stock of argeilehs and melt them down into TAP vapes. These vapes are designed on cradle to cradle principles, so they are easy to maintain, easy to upgrade and in the case where neither is possible, infinitely recyclable.