The waste piled up around a garbage dumpster in Saida, southern Lebanon, April, 2024. (Credit: Abdallah Mountasser/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT — The company responsible for collecting garbage in Saida has abruptly halted operations, leaving waste to pile up in the streets of the southern Lebanese coastal city.
According to our correspondent in the South, City Blu's contract with the municipality has expired and will not be renewed. The Saida municipality announced in a press release on Friday that it would "bear the burden of waste collection until a new company takes over," pulling from a municipal solidarity fund.
That new company is NTCC, which was responsible for waste collection and cleaning in the city in the past but had ceased to do so when the city failed to pay.
"We have given instructions to the municipal emergency teams to start collecting waste at dawn," the local government announced, indicating that it had "begun coordinating with a new company to find out when it will start work."
"We are asking citizens to facilitate the work of the municipal teams by not throwing garbage outside the dumpsters," the press release adds, noting that new dumpsters will also be installed on Saturday.
It's not the first time Saida's streets have been littered with mounds of garbage. The national waste management system has evolved very little since the 1990s. In 2015, the sudden closure of Lebanon's most important landfill, the Naameh landfill in Chouf, caused a garbage crisis across the country. Waste management is often affected by the state's irregular payments to key waste collection companies, Ramco and City Blu.
