The waste piled up around a garbage dumpster in Saida, southern Lebanon, April, 2024. (Credit: Abdallah Mountasser/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT — The private company IBC Inc. which manages both the waste treatment plant and the landfill site in Saida, said on Monday that it is aiming to treat all its accumulated waste within the next three months.
Established in 2008, the treatment plant was initially designed as a “zero-waste" facility, meaning the company would keep up with the city's waste production and solve the garbage crisis. However, the plant has failed to fulfill its purpose, ending up with a landfill that gradually ballooned into a mountain that towers over the coastline in a dense residential area.
The company said in a statement on Monday that as a result of increasing employees’ working hours and shifts, "the percentage of waste treatment inside the factory has increased to about 60 percent per day." IBC claimed that it will continue to raise this percentage until it reaches a stage where all trash that enters the plant will be treated “within three months."
The company is expecting this initiative to "lead to a radical end to the problem of waste accumulation in Saida."
In April, the municipality’s contract with City Blu, the company responsible for collecting garbage in Saida, expired and was not renewed. As a result, waste began to pile up in the streets of the southern Lebanese coastal city. The municipality announced that it would "bear the burden of waste collection until a new company takes over," pulling from a municipal solidarity fund.
It was not the first time Saida's streets had 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.
