“Out of sight, out of mind” has been the underlying philosophy of the world’s approach to solid-waste management since the Industrial Revolution. In Lebanese cities, dumpsters scattered conveniently around the city are the perceived “last stop” for household waste, pitched out and forgotten. But as the Lebanese, and the world, are coming to realize, garbage can come back to bite. 

Lebanon produces some 1.4 million tons of solid waste a year, according to statistics from the Mediterranean Environmental Technical Assistance Program (METAP), which coordinates an international initiative working with the Environment Ministry. 

That’s approximately a kilogram of garbage per citizen, per day, increasing at a rate of about 6.5 percent annually. A small percentage of Lebanon’s solid waste is recycled or composted. The vast majority, however, ends up in an open dumpsite; sometimes bulldozed over in a landfill. 

Lebanon has no solid-waste management policy, according to METAP. Each municipality is responsible for the handling of its own waste, supervised by the Interior Ministry. 

However, Municipalities often lack the financial resources to deal with their own solid waste in an appropriate fashion, according to Dr. Ali Darwish, General Secretary of the NGO Greenline. Strapped for cash and lacking the expertise to tackle growing volumes of household garbage, they often resort to the most basic solution: open dumping and burning. 

“You can see this yourself if you take a drive through the villages,” he said. “Outside of town, or maybe up in the mountains a little way away, there’ll be a spot where they’ve dumped. Sometimes it’s right at the edge of the village.” 

It is almost impossible to assemble a comprehensive list of Lebanon’s dump sites because the practice of open dumping is so loosely monitored. However, METAP estimates that every village has at least one, if not more, dump site in its vicinity. In the Mohafazat of West Bekaa, dumping is primarily done on the banks of the Litani. In the southern districts of Jezzine, Saida and Sour, much of the local waste is dumped into the Ras al-Ain. Many costal cities dump directly into the Mediterranean. Industrial waste is dealt with in a similar manner. 

As one would expect, larger populations require larger dumps. The huge Naameh and Bslaim dumps services the Greater Beirut and Mount Lebanon area, while Sidon, Tripoli and Tyre each have their own large sites. These dumps are often filled past capacity. 

One striking example of the dangers of overloading is the dump at Sidon. In 2006, in the wake of heavy rains, the “garbage mountain” collapsed, depositing over 150 tons of waste into the Mediterranean in what many termed an ecological disaster. 

While some steps have been taken in the interim – the Burj Hammoud dump, long perceived as a potential health hazard, was closed in the late 1990s – little has changed in Lebanon’s overall waste management policy, said Darwish. The major problem is lack of public incentive to change individual production of waste, he said. 

Waste management is operated as a public service in the sense that the public does not pay according to the amount of garbage it generates. Charging the public for garbage services would provide an economic incentive to reduce production, according to Darwish. 

The public already pays these costs indirectly, he said. Currently, the government and some municipalities contract private companies to handle municipal waste using lump-sum contracts, whereby companies are paid per ton of waste collected. The more garbage the public produces, the more profit the company reaps. 

The close ties between these companies – most notably Sukleen, which operates in the Greater Beirut and Mount Lebanon area, where municipalities had no say in the contracting decision– and the government mean it is unlikely that policy will change in the near future, Darwish said. 

Lebanon has already had one serious brush. During the Civil War, when the country was still locked in a state of anarchy, Lebanon was used as a dump site for toxic and biologically hazardous chemicals by European countries. 

The largest shipment, originating from the Italian company Jellywax, contained a cocktail of pesticides, pharmaceuticals and toxic heavy metals, according the group Greenpeace. 

These shipments were later ruled illegal by the Basel convention, an international treaty governing the transfer of hazardous waste, and the European countries of origin were constrained to remove the materials from Lebanese soil.