Black smoke emanating from the city of Tripoli on Sunday, March 9, 2025. (Photo provided by our correspondent Michel Hallak)
Almost every day lately, thick clouds of black smoke have been hovering in the skies above Tripoli. Already a recurring phenomenon, it has become even more uncontrollable, with at least three cases of large-scale wildfires started in the North Lebanese capital this week: One near the old souk last Sunday; a second in the Bab al-Tebbaneh neighborhood on Wednesday; and a third near the port on Thursday evening.
"With each fire, nauseating odors spread throughout the city, making the air unbreathable for several hours, or even longer in neighborhoods near the cremation sites," said Nariman Shamaa, a journalist and activist working on gender equality and environmental issues, contacted by L'Orient-Le Jour. "This is not a new phenomenon, but a scourge that has been going on for several years and poisons and pollutes the air that residents breathe."
This "scourge" is well known to Tripolitans: A mixture of tires, electrical cables, scrap metal or plastic and metal waste incinerated in urban areas to extract a few veins of copper or iron, before reselling them for a few handfuls of dollars. Over time, this illegal practice has become commonplace for the city's poor who are forced to dig through the garbage, much to the dismay of residents, who are now forced to regularly endure the nauseating stench from the fire pits that have multiplied throughout Tripoli.
"Numerous illegal dumps where tires are burned are located at various entrances to the city, near the souk, the Arab University, in Mina and Beddawi neighborhoods, and around the Rashid Karameh International Fair," said the activist. Apart from an army intervention at the international fair, which did not allow the waste to be removed on site, no concrete action has been taken by the municipality and public authorities," she stated.
'It is not our responsibility'
Contacted by L'Orient-Le Jour, the head of the Tripoli municipality, Riad Yamak, blamed the "federation," the name of the urban area that includes Tripoli, Mina, Beddawi and Qalamoun, for waste treatment.
"The Batco company, which handles garbage collection, says it cannot handle the collection of certain types of waste, including tires, because this is not included in its contract with the federation, which is not the responsibility of the municipality," the mayor said. At the same time, a security source told L'Orient-Le Jour that an investigation was opened at the initiative of the regional department of the Internal Security Forces (ISF) and "that one of the alleged perpetrators of these recent fires has been arrested."
Shamaa claimed to have personally filed a complaint in 2018 after suffering "asthma attacks" due to exposure to toxic fumes, which prompted her to move outside of Tripoli. But "political interference" allegedly led to the release of the officials arrested at the time "after a few days in detention," she said.
"The prisons are already full because of all other forms of crime," Yamak explained, who also deplored the lack of personnel among the security forces deployed in her city, "which does not exceed 200 officers for 400,000 inhabitants, or less than 10 percent of the number imposed by international law, which sets a rate of one police officer for every 500 inhabitants."
"Fires are often started at night, when the police presence is weakest," he added. "It is then difficult to identify those responsible, given that we do not have a functioning surveillance camera system."
However, under Environmental Protection Law No. 444, which came into force in 2002, any offender is supposed to be subject to financial and criminal penalties, "but there are about twenty implementing decrees missing for this law to be applied. No decree specifies the amount of these fines or possible prison sentences," Shamaa stated.
'A tragedy narrowly avoided'
Opened in June 2017, the Tripoli waste treatment plant experienced multiple periods of closure and changes of operator before landing in the hands of Batco. It is supposed to handle "street sweeping and cleaning, poster removal, and waste collection and transportation" in the city at a rate of "450 tons per day," according to its website. When contacted, the company remained unreachable before publication.
This widespread negligence could have led to a near-fatal disaster last month when another fire broke out in a building next to a daycare center in Mina. It spread after a faulty power generator caught fire and burned down surrounding buildings.
"Fortunately, the incident took place on a Sunday and there were no children at the scene," said MP Najat Aoun Saliba, who visited the scene last week with one of the local officials, Elie Khoury, a Lebanese Forces MP for the Maronite seat of the city.
"I was unaware of the level of negligence and the extent of the violations of safety standards regarding power generators in Tripoli," she said. "The fact that a generator could be installed in a closed area, especially near a daycare, contravenes all the standards established by the decrees issued by the Ministry of the Environment."
In addition to the issue of generators, the MP's main concern was that the recent repeated fires in Tripoli already led her to look closely at air quality problems in the region.
"I have received a very large number of reports from residents. The air quality in Tripoli has deteriorated significantly, and there is a high risk for people with allergies, asthma, and chronic respiratory diseases, as well as the development of cancer when such quantities of toxic gases are released into the air so frequently," she explained.
According to a study conducted by the MP at the American University of Beirut (AUB) research center, Saliba stated that the risk of cancer has increased by 30 percent in Lebanon, based on calculations based on the increase in the level of carcinogenic substances present in the air measured between 2016 and 2023.
"If residents wish to send me photos of these tire fires, they can contact me via my office number so that I can act as an MP to submit this complaint to the Ministers of the Environment and the Interior," she said.
This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.