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We’re about five metres away from the Mediterranean Sea. To my right, the Zouk Mosbeh power plant pumps out plumes of thick grey smoke into an otherwise bright blue sky. The Jounieh Valley towers behind me over the coastline, a metropolis full of hotels and entertainment venues just outside of Beirut. To my left, I can see some sort of resort in the distance. But all I can smell – and all I can see around me – is rubbish.
This beach has already been cleaned up 16 times, and had been cleaned less than a week before I stepped onto it with Joslin Kehdy, the founder of Recycle Lebanon, which arranges the clean-ups. Plastic is turning up on beaches around the world, but the difference in Lebanon is that rubbish is also being directly dumped into the sea and coastal landfills – spelling disaster for the shoreline’s ecosystem and public health.
Lebanon’s waste crisis began in 2015 when a huge landfill site closed and government authorities failed to implement a contingency plan in time to replace it; dumping and burning waste on the streets became widespread. The campaign group Human Rights Watch calls it "a national health crisis".
Kehdy tells me that calling her organisation Recycle Lebanon was a pun. It’s not just about introducing recycling initiatives; it’s about forming a new path for a country tackling corruption, which she and other activists believe fuels the waste crisis. The traditionally centralised waste management system in the country has very little sorting capabilities, meaning that the money isn’t in recycling, it’s in generating lots of waste, they argue.
In a list of 180 countries, the 2017 Corruptions Perceptions Index, produced by the NGO Transparency International, ranked Lebanon as the 143rd "least corrupt nation" out of 175 countries – in other words, there are only 32 countries where corruption is worse. According to its website: “Lebanon’s confessional power-sharing arrangement” – that’s the delicate governmental balance it’s forged between the country’s many sects – “fuels patronage networks and clientelism, which undermines further the country’s governance system.”
When the rubbish crisis first started, it stimulated a civil movement; protestors rallied outside the Lebanese government and declared “You Stink!” Gradually this evolved into initiatives like Beirut Madinati, a new political party, and the Waste Management Coalition which is currently campaigning against the government’s proposals to purchase incinerators.
But it’s also forced environmental organisations to find surprising and much-needed solutions in the face of slow political change – and they’re proving that a country that’s only the size of Connecticut might be one of Earth’s best playgrounds for environmental innovation.
“The issue with incinerators is that it doesn’t suit our type of waste,” says Kehdy. “Around 70% of our waste is organic. It’s too wet to be processed in incineration." Secondly – as with most waste management methods – incineration also requires strict sorting at source.
It looks like literally everything is thrown into the sea.
More than 2,000 people have taken part in beach clean-ups with Recycle Lebanon, proving that there’s an appetite for citizens and businesses to get involved. They’re totally zero-waste, too; even the face masks that people wear are re-usable and the filters recyclable. “We set up zero-waste clean-ups with signs so people can learn about the type of waste, the process behind it, where it gets recycled and how they can change the type of products they’re consuming.”
Walking up and down this beach, it’s clear how much general living habits here influence the sort of waste that turns up. We lose count of the small, single-use plastic espresso cups. Having lived in Lebanon, I know how the Lebanese like their coffee – fast and furious. You’ll finish one little cup, throw it into the bin and have someone pour you another. There’s no conversation about re-usable coffee cups that many countries in the West are having now. There are plastic bottles full of water, the tips of hookah pipes, toys and so many single-use plastic bags. I’m also surprised by the amount of medical waste, clothes and astro-turf. It looks like literally everything is thrown into the sea.
A lot of the rejectable waste that Kehdy can’t do much with gets sent to an organisation called Cedar Environmental, run by Ziad Abichaker. As well as providing composting facilities for Lebanon’s organic waste they have built Material Recovery Facilities around the country which recover as much as possible from thrown away materials. Abichaker has even set up glass bottle bins around Beirut and brings the thrown away glass to Sarafand, a small town in South Lebanon where the glass is formed into different shapes by glassblowers, upholding a tradition that’s existed in the country since Phoenician times.
