In the absence of a clear official policy on dealing with the influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon, municipalities where refugees have settled are being forced to play a leading role in the management and provision of services. This has placed significant pressure on local infrastructure, with the increase of solid waste generation being one of the most visible effects of the crisis at the local level. The World Bank’s socio-economic impact assessment of the Syrian crisis showed that waste generation has doubled and even tripled in some areas of the country, leading to water contamination and the spread of various types of diseases. However, while the fact that waste generation has increased following the influx of refugees cannot be refuted, the absence of a cohesive and sustainable solid waste strategy is the primary cause of the current waste management crisis.
Already contending with very limited financial and human resources, local authorities collect and manage a significant portion of total solid waste in Lebanon. This, despite the fact that municipalities lack the free will to adopt a consistent solid waste strategy, and remain financially and administratively dependent on the central government and the Independent Municipal Fund’s inadequate and unfair distribution of resources. Such conditions limit their management capacities, especially given often weak coordination between municipalities.
The absence of a national waste strategy and the consequences this has had on local authorities account for the severity of the current problem. Since the civil war, and later between 1998 and 2006, the Ministry of Environment dealt with waste in line with an emergency plan. In 1996, the state gave Sukleen, a private waste management company, permission to open a landfill in Naameh to receive waste from Beirut and Mount Lebanon. While the landfill was slated to offer a temporary solution until a national waste strategy was adopted, the situation developed differently in practice. As a result of the prolongation of the emergency plan, Naameh landfill still receives 3,000 tons of solid waste every day, three times the amount it was designated for. This has prompted protests from local residents against the overuse of the site. The most recent deadline to close the landfill, which has been pushed back several times, is set for 17 July 2015. However, with the failure to find alternative landfill sites, the closure of Naameh will likely further exacerbate problems in processing solid waste.
[…]
It should be recognized, then, that refugees are not the cause of Lebanon’s current waste management crisis. Instead, the influx has certainly added to the crisis, and the refugees’ presence has highlighted systemic problems rather than accounted for the overload of the system, which was already overloaded.
