Lebanon's garbage crisis: No end in site

Why is it that the simplest of choices and the easiest and most instinctual of decisions to make get needlessly complicated in Lebanon, as momentum slows to a crawl and competing special interests, political cowardice and simple selfishness, incompetence and the need to see others fail take over? Lebanon’s garbage crisis needn’t have ever happened if two decades ago policy makers took steps to ensure proper disposal, recycling, transformation and incineration of solid waste for the long term, and had taken courageous and unpopular decisions to ensure their implementation.

The above image is of a waste incinerator in Austria. Waste incineration is nothing like the old war-time tradition of 'harq zbeleh' usually in a metal barrel on the side of a road with sparks flying off in every direction! And yet, there seems to be wide spread popular resistance to building such incinerators in Lebanon. 

In fact, a garbage dump it not piles of unsorted trash dumped in an open field and covered with soil, building a proper waste disposal site is a complicated project it seems. Several layers of insulation have to be put down to ensure no dangerous toxins leach into the soil and ground water. The ground has to be leveled to the proper gradient, wells have to be dug to ensure gasses building up from fermenting waste have a vent to escape from, gas that is presumably then used to run turbines and produce power. Sigh* How easy it sounds technically, on paper, in theory. I bet all the greatest planners and minds of this Earth never had to contend with the irrational Lebanese mind!

For us, our emotions lead the way, they take us as if on some endorphin and adrenaline fuelled power trip, pushing us to block roads, burn tyres, our arms flailing about in revolutionary indignation as gums masticate the air all the while our lungs release massive amounts of CO2 making noises that resemble rational words all sandwiched between angry pronouncements and veiled promises of more violent outcomes. Bravo! Good show! Truly, Lebanon, it was a good and entertaining display of something mildly entertaining, but we’re all still were we left off and our garbage is building and going unsorted and untreated with every passing minute and every wasted breath.

The story of garbage in Lebanon is one familiar to all the Lebanese, it is one of lost opportunities and irrational fears from deadly incinerator fumes and stinking haphazard dump sites too close for comfort. It is a story of broken promises and a broken trust between the people and their government. It is a tale of a half-able limping waste management infrastructure betrayed by State inaction that has hobbled along for as long as it could. It is a story of thwarted plans to transform some garbage in to fuel pellets for industrial furnaces and to generate electricity from heat and gas from solid waste. It is a story all too familiar to us all.

I heard some municipal official on the television the other day say that radical measures (to solve the garbage problem) are easier to implement in times of extreme emergencies as people will be more likely to accept them. That’s where the real danger lies; it lies in the hearts of desperate, frightened people who will accept whatever solution is proposed as long as the garbage gets dealt with. My concern is if waste collection, sorting and disposal are delegated to individual municipalities how will they deal with their garbage? Will there be any real central government oversight over these municipal authorities? Will they adhere to proper internationally recognized waste disposal standards, or will it simply be a case of finding an empty plot of land and just dumping unsorted waste there then burying it? What will happen then after toxins from fermenting steaming piles of waste contaminates the very ground water we get piped into our homes, unfiltered, untreated? And what new problems and health issues will arise as a result?

Our procrastination and lax approach to pressing urgent matters in Lebanon is legendary and it is also a cautionary tale, it is a sad tragic tale of zero sum politics, of a monster unleashed, a Frankenstein’s creature loosely put together from rags and orphaned parts, its rage fueled by years of neglect, national carelessness, political inaction, corruption and widespread public ignorance of the issues.

Every argument in a social setting over public policy, whether about electricity, garbage, water, roads and bridges, dams, rock quarries and national parks, all boil down to political interests and Machiavellian machinations. In fact, we insist on some secret intrigue being behind every problem. Where there is no connection, people invent one, all to prove a point, their point that its all about one political leader trying to thwart another political leader’s project. In some cases, that can certainly be argued to be the case, but in many cases it’s a question of irrational fear and public misperceptions, bad PR and a lot of misunderstanding. But for the Lebanese there are no misunderstandings, only plots, real or imagined, which lurk behind every corner and under every rock.

Political leaders are called decision makers because they are supposed to make the tough decisions and bear the responsibility of all repercussions stemming from those decisions. In Lebanon, however, the overriding norm seems to be that the leader must follow the people, even if, Jim-Hacker-like, he/she follows them down the path of hysteria and overreaction.

And so, we arrive at this miserable but avoidable state of affairs. Our emotional and irrational responses, particularly in the voting booth, have pushed us to this brink we now stand at. What next, I wonder.