A week into the July trash crisis, when garbage collection was suspended in the capital and Mount Lebanon, a thousand demonstrators marched across Downtown Beirut, drumming, chanting and denouncing the government. “We are pissed off with the smell of garbage. We don’t want landfills. We want recycling,” one said. But environmentalists and the Environment Ministry are at odds over whether Lebanon can sort and recycle its trash. Recent pronouncements from the ministry reveal serious doubts about the country’s preparedness to embrace such initiatives. Environmentalists counter that recycling is not only possible, but necessary. “We cannot build a long-term strategy on landfilling and incineration,” said Paul Abi Rachid, the head of Lebanon EcoMovement. “We are running out of resources. We are running out of land. We cannot keep dumping and polluting. Recycling must be part of the solution.” Speaking after Prime Minister Tammam Salam’s ministerial committee announced a lasting solution to the trash crisis on July 25, Environment Minister Mohammad Machnouk did not mention recycling once. He and other top officials, including Salam, have said that the capital must incinerate its waste. “The solution for Beirut is to establish incinerators that produce electricity,” Machnouk said on July 19. To the Environment Ministry, recycling is an aspiration, not a policy. For 10 days in July, Sukleen, the garbage collection contractor for Beirut, had no access to disposal grounds, and the capital drowned in rotting refuse. While activists called on officials to start widespread recycling and composting programs, the ministry said it needed a more urgent solution. “Countries take 20 years to set up sorting at the source, and they want to do it in one month?” a ministry engineer said, referring to a key component of the environmentalists’ demands. Efficient recycling practices require trash producers – that is, everyone – to at least partly sort their trash at the source, at home and at work. The notion is pure fantasy, the ministry believes. “That is not Lebanese society. You have to be realistic. Somebody who is throwing his trash from the car without stopping at the bin, you want him to start sorting at the source? This is impossible,” the engineer said. Awareness, incentives and enforcement Resignation has long burdened Lebanese politics. “The saying is, you can’t straighten the wild cucumber,” said Ali Darwish, president of Green Line Association, an environmental NGO. “This isn’t a way to manage a country, and how you move forward,” he said. “Yes, separation at the source might be lunacy today. But people change, with awareness, incentives and enforcement.” Environmentalists point out that the trash crisis has already spurred municipalities to have their residents sort at the source. “Tell the Environment Ministry that in Roumieh, in just five days, 65 percent of the village has started to sort,” said Paul Abi Rachid, the head of Lebanon Eco Movement. But that is Roumieh, a fairly homogenous, suburban town. What about the Beirut and Tripoli slums? Will the residents of neglected and violence-wracked Bab al-Tabbaneh bother to sort? In fact, many already make a living out of it. “These people live on waste sorting. People who live in the slums work in sorting, informal separation and collection,” Darwish said. “Hundreds of families, in Sabra and Shatila and Burj al-Barajneh. – they leave no metals or plastics. Of course, they need regulation and monitoring. But if you do the proper procedure, they will help you collect. Why not?”Recycling takes time, incineration costly The experiences of other countries suggest that new recycling initiatives take years to bear results. “It took 20 years for San Francisco to achieve 70 percent recycling,” the Environment Ministry engineer told The Daily Star. “The Netherlands have been recycling for 18 years now. Amsterdam recycles just 25 percent. In rural areas, you have 75 percent.” “Please stop saying, ‘Sort at the source.’ It’s bullshit,” he said. “The only solution is to landfill or to incinerate in Lebanon. With time, you can sort at the source. It’s not a plan. It’s a goal that you aim for.” Without sorting at the source, Lebanon is indeed left with just two ways to handle its waste at home: It must landfill it or incinerate. Researchers and activists warn these are not wise policy goals. “Sanitary landfilling is not feasible,” said George Ayoub, a civil engineering professor at the American University of Beirut. “Land is too expensive. Plus, no one in Lebanon will accept having a landfill in their backyard anymore.” He keeps a photocopy of a 1972 newspaper article in his office that shows him at 37 years old vigorously supervising the construction of a solid waste management site. He is the doyen of Lebanese waste management. Ayoub does not offer a warm endorsement of incineration either. “I wouldn’t say incineration is the solution, because it is expensive. If you want to control the emissions, which are highly toxic, it will cost a lot. It’s not an easy thing to do,” he said. Last Thursday, the Cabinet floated a new possibility to dispose Lebanon’s waste. It began to inquire whether it could export it. Talks Friday between Economy Minister Alain Hakim and the German ambassador suggested it could be done, for a price. The country could expect to pay exporters between $70 and $100 per ton of collected garbage, according to Hakim. In the haze of the garbage crisis, it is appealing to imagine ships hauling off Lebanon’s soaking, unsorted waste, slipping off with the country’s headaches below the horizon. Still, a compelling case can be made to sort the garbage at the source: money. The more recyclable material Lebanon removes from its exported garbage, the less it ships and the less it pays; local recycling plants moreover will gladly pay for the extracted materials, furnishing revenue to offset the export account. In fact, local plants are so hungry for recyclables, they actually import them from abroad. “We import used plastic from different countries,” said Sobhiya Najjar, a founder of the Sar Lezem Rassak Yifrouz (It’s time you start sorting) campaign, which promotes sorting at the source. “We have a great green business sector in Lebanon.” Landfilling, incineration and export – these are the possibilities officials have specified for Lebanon. Can it, in addition or instead, recycle? Sooner rather than later It will take years for Lebanon to catch up with the world’s more advanced recycling programs, which, to environmentalists, means there’s no better time to start than now. And they say that awareness campaigns, launched and mothballed many times over the past two decades, cannot alone launch an effective program. Pointing to the new traffic laws, Darwish said regulations and enforcement are what produced results. “People who never used to wear seatbelts are using them, and they are telling you to use them.” “Some do out of conviction,” he continued. “Others do it to avoid a LL200,000 fine. That’s good enough. Do you think Germans sort their waste because they are [environmentally] aware? No. I lived in Germany in the ’90s. Many of us were recycling only because we were afraid of the fine.” There is a misconception that, with recycling, a few bad apples can ruin the whole dumpster. If, in a 10-story building, one household throws its trash with everyone else’s recyclables, they will have spoiled the sorting on a grand scale. But if the consequences are indeed so catastrophic, other countries do not seem to have gotten the memo. “It’s like this the whole world over. You continue to sort at established facilities. People do not sort 100 percent at home. But when you sort better at home, and you sort better in facilities, you reach higher percentages,” Darwish said. Sukleen does sort at its facilities, though reports indicate that they do not harvest most recyclables. It may be that scavengers remove plastic, glass, cans and paper beforehand. With labor so cheap, employing scavengers may indeed be the cheapest way to sort, after the source, in Lebanon. Sukleen, whose Lebanon contract expired on July 17, is paid $147 per ton to handle Beirut and Mount Lebanon’s trash, according to recent comments by Machnouk. For that rate, which is many times greater than what is charged in Cairo or Amman, “you take a part of that money and incentivize scavenging,” Darwish said, pointing to the many scrap yards in the country’s slums. Recycling will not soon replace other forms of waste disposal. Darwish’s optimistic projection is that within five years, the country could be removing recyclables from half of its garbage. Even if it takes longer, it will still pay dividends to reach this milestone. “You make use of 50 percent of your resources. Paper is a resource. Plastic bottles are a resource. These are raw materials,” Darwish said. “Let’s suppose we landfill the rest. Had we landfilled just 50 percent of the trash in Naameh, it would have lasted another 17 years.” The Daily Star
