By Biljana Markova, Founder & CEO of Clean Rebel
As CEO of Clean Rebel, I believe that clean living is a powerful form of leadership. On Emirati Women’s Day 2025, I’m reflecting on the Emirati women who turned that belief into action. Women who chose sustainability over waste, restoration over depletion, and community over convenience.
Over the last half-century, Emirati women have shaped a sustainability story that feels both deeply local and globally relevant. Consider Habiba Al Mar’ashi, who co-founded Emirates Environmental Group back in 1991, years before “ESG” became everyday vocabulary. Her work brought together schools, businesses, and municipalities into practical recycling and awareness programmes, and later gave birth to the Arabia CSR Network to integrate responsibility into corporate culture. This paved the way for today’s circular economy conversations.
From the policy front, H.E. Dr. Shaikha Salem Al Dhaheri, Secretary General of the Environment Agency - Abu Dhabi, has guided world-class conservation and regulatory efforts - proof that a thriving economy and healthy ecosystems can, in fact, reinforce each other. Under EAD’s stewardship, Abu Dhabi’s single-use plastic bag ban has already prevented the use of an estimated 364 million bags in just three years.
At the global stage, H.E. Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak’s leadership has been a catalyst for change. As President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for COP28, she mainstreamed nature and inclusion across climate action, bringing biodiversity into boardrooms and negotiations where it once felt like an afterthought. Her tenure made it far easier for founders like me to talk about ecosystems alongside emissions, not as an add-on but as a core strategy.
We also celebrate H.H. Sheikha Shamma bint Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, whose UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) is mobilizing the ecosystem around circularity, carbon solutions, and adaptation. It’s the kind of connective tissue the region needs, where startups, regulators, investors, and researchers can test, learn, and scale.
These names are highlights from a much longer roster. Their collective fingerprints are visible across the UAE’s blue-green agenda, from mangrove restoration (a national drive toward 100 million mangroves by 2030) to grassroots nature-education and citizen science led by partners like Emirates Nature–WWF.
So what does this legacy mean for Clean Rebel, and for me personally?
It means we stay true to our foundation: creating products with natural, organic ingredients sourced from small, family-owned farms, supporting communities that live in balance with nature. It means ensuring every formula remains vegan, cruelty-free, and locally produced, so that clean beauty reflects not just what’s inside the bottle, but how it’s made. It means we commit to plastic-free packaging with clean inks, and scale our in-house bottle recycling programme, because sustainability doesn’t stop when a product is sold. And it means we continue choosing to partner with woman-owned businesses and partners who share our values, while continuing to educate on clean beauty and eco-friendly practices across the industry.
Looking ahead, it means we go further. We are preparing to invest in local ingredients in partnership with UAE universities, harnessing the resilience of desert plants that thrive with less water and preserving cultural traditions along the way. We will expand our recycling program, innovate refill models and right-size packaging, and publish transparent progress reports on carbon, water, and plastic footprints so customers can measure sustainability in their own homes. We will also build coalitions across sectors - government, NGOs, and businesses alike - because systemic change doesn’t happen in silos.
At Clean Rebel, our goal is simple: make the clean choice the easy choice. If we do our jobs right, sustainability won’t feel like a lifestyle. It will feel like home.
