Beirut Madinati: On Solid Waste Disposal

Source: Akhbar

One of the most pressing concerns for the residents of Beirut is the current solid waste management of their city. Since the end of the Civil War, Beirut’s solid waste strategy has been based on disposing solid waste in landfills. Technically, this strategy was supposed to be used until a more comprehensive sustainable strategy was developed and implemented. This never happened, and various governments relied on this strategy for 18 years which eventually led to the recent waste crisis.

Beirut Madinati Strategy: Large-scale Infrastructure – Water, Sewerage and Electricity

Source: Daily Star

One of the ten interventions planned by the municipal election campaign Beirut Madinati targets Beirut’s large water, sewerage, and electricity infrastructure. Lebanon has major infrastructure and structural problems that prevent it from providing an adequate supply of clean water, and electricity as well as sewerage treatment services. This has lead to high costs on the Lebanese Government and people. There are also serious adverse environmental impacts. Wastewater is disposed to the sea with no treatment and the thousands of unregulated private generators have decreased Beirut’s air quality.

Beirut Madinati targets better living conditions in the capital

Source: Beirut Madinati

Next month, the municipal elections will be held throughout Lebanon. These elections, which take place every six years, are for the municipal councils of all municipalities of Lebanon. The Municipal Council is responsible for providing local municipal services and with other government entities are involved in local planning, infrastructural development, and local services.

Lebanon has a history of failures to tackle the issue of waste

Source: The Daily Star

The trash crisis in Lebanon has been temporarily resolved after a cabinet-approved decision to reopen Na’ameh for 2 months and establish landfills in two other sites for a period of 4 years. However, there is little hope that a long term sustainable solution will ever be realized under the current political conditions in the country. The problem can be traced as far back as the mid-1990s, when the World Bank offered Lebanon a loan to undergo post-war reconstruction efforts for its infrastructure. Part of the funding was intended to solve the country’s solid waste problem. In 2007, the World Bank tasked an independent evaluator to assess the project. Here are the evaluator’s findings:

“The Solid Waste Project’s objective to provide solid waste collection and treatment facilities for the whole country was overly ambitious. Although this objective was in line with Government’s initial strategy, project design was only modestly relevant because it failed to take account of Lebanon’s inexperience in solid waste management, lack of subsector capacity at the end of the civil war, and local political opposition to solid waste facilities and landfill sites. Its implementation was particularly fraught because of unmitigated social resistance and government’s changes in sector strategy that led to the withdrawal of Japanese co-financing and the restructuring of the project in 2001. At completion, only one of the 15 sanitary landfills planned was completed [the one in Zahle]. The project almost totally failed to achieve its objectives, and its outcome is rated as unsatisfactory.”