Garbage began piling up in the streets of Tripoli on Monday morning, Nov. 3, 2025, before contacts from the municipality provisionally ended the strike by Lavajet, the company in charge of collection.(Credit: Michel Hallak)
TRIPOLI — The waste collection company Lavajet staged a several-hour strike in Tripoli on Monday morning, as it had announced last Thursday in a statement.
The company, which is bound by a contract with the Tripoli-al-Fayhaa Union of Municipalities, denounces the lack of renewal since June 30 of its expired contract, while continuing to work solely on the basis of a verbal agreement with the union. The call for tenders to select a new contractor has yet to take place, and the company has not received its dues since last April.
On a phone call with L’Orient-Le Jour, General Saïd al-Rez, Lavajet’s director for the Tripoli municipality, confirmed that the strike lasted several hours but that "the company ended it following contacts with the relevant authorities, notably Interior Minister Ahmad Hajjar, who promised to raise the issue in Cabinet on Thursday."
Last Friday, Waël Zmerly, president of the federation, told L’Orient-le Jour that "the matter is in the hands of the interior minister," who "should sign the document so that Lavajet’s contract extension becomes legal."
According to Rez, Lavajet resumed trash collection Monday, speeding up the process because garbage had started to pile up in the streets and the delay needed to be caught up. "The strike hurts us first and foremost, but we had no other choice to make ourselves heard," he said.
The Tripoli municipality announced Monday, in a statement relayed by our correspondent, that "municipal council president Abdel Hamid Karimeh made numerous contacts in the morning, particularly with the interior minister and Sarkis Azhour, owner of Lavajet, to ensure that collection would resume."
"Following these contacts, the company resumed collection in the streets of Tripoli, pending the completion of the administrative measures necessary for the extension of the contract since June 30, which is expected to be addressed at the next Cabinet meeting," the statement added.
The city of Tripoli is suffering, like many other localities, from poor waste management. In addition to this recurring issue with collection contracts, the city’s main landfill will reach capacity in six months, with no definitive solution in sight, environmental expert and city resident Jalal Halwani told us.
Reporting by our regional correspondent Michel Hallak.
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