We recorded many important interpretations during our scientific visit, which we participated in last week in Berlin (Germany). “Friedrich Ebert” Foundation organized the visit, in which we met with officials from the Ministry of Environment in Germany, the Parliament, municipalities, and from the private sector, to obtain information on the waste management file.
The first observation is that there is a great ability in Germany to reconcile between conflicting interests for all parties, and this is governed by clear moral, economic, philosophical, and logical political rules. Scientific progress is subject to the requirements of these rules, and it only advances more than them in exceptional cases; work is ongoing to control this progress. The issue of respecting the law is secure, despite the constant struggle to improve legislation and change it. There is permanent planning for managing files, at least for ten years, in order to avoid emergency situations and crises.
We also recognized the respect towards the hierarchy in the development of principles, decision-making, and legislation in managing environmental files, including waste management, and this starts from the European Union, the Federal Union of Germany, to the states (16 states), municipalities (11000 Municipalities), households, institutions and individuals.
One of the first principles adopted by the European Union to tackle the waste issue is the adoption of the principle of avoidance (mitigation), meaning taking all necessary measures to prevent the products from becoming wastes, before even thinking of how will they be sorted, recycled, incinerated, or landfilled later on.
This is the principle that advanced industrial countries like Germany found a great difficulty in implementing, since they are originally industrialized countries, and since they measure their options practically according to the criteria of “feasibility” before any other criteria, taking into account the environmental impact of their options.
Based on this, the underlying trends in an industrialized country could be interpreted and understood, and the preference between one industry or another could also be made, along with recycling, landfilling, incineration, and fermentation.
Eventually, they are all industries (and have effects), but what prevails is the option of mitigation, avoidance, or recovery. The preference between recycling and manufacturing, or taking advantage of the calorific value of wastes, and choosing the incineration option and power generation, and benefiting from this value and not another, is done according to the same economic and industrial basis.
Therefore, what encourages sorting is benefiting from recycling some materials. Some of those materials are non-recyclable or the cost of recycling them is very high, so companies resort to the second option, which is incineration and energy generation.
Even if the environmental cost of these options is not taken into consideration at many times, the focus of research is on financing options, and the discussions over who will pay the price of the final treatment of the environmental effects of manufacturing.
In order to pay for the treatment of wastes, the responsibility of the manufacturer is discussed, and this is divided between the manufacturer and the consumer, in accordance with the regulations on materials and products (we will tackle their philosophy, mechanisms, fairness, and implementation on the “covering” level later on), knowing that all of this is still controversial between all parties in industrialized countries.
The biggest conclusion that we came out with from this scientific visit, has confirmed our previous intellectual choices on what we need in Lebanon to put an end to our waste management crisis. These options, which emerge from the fact that we are a non-industrialized country, and tend to be a consuming country.
Therefore, we should cling more to the principles of mitigation, prevention, and recovery (recovery of goods and dangerous tools, for example, and factories or importers must bear their responsibility), and they should also come up with strategies, laws, and plans for integrated management.
We were also sure that the decentralization trends in treatment would not be fair, and might result in more chaos, exploitation, and depletion of resources and of the economy, if they were not part of a national strategy and a strong and fair centralized plan.
