A legacy of conservation beneath the cedars

Lebanon's pollution crisis has long spread across its rivers, forests, mountains, and towns, fueled by inadequate waste management, uncontrolled dumping, and weak environmental enforcement. The Bsharri National Committee for Environmental Protection has been working to confront these challenges at the local level.

Since its founding in the early 1990s, the committee has led pioneering initiatives ranging from closing illegal dumpsites and launching Lebanon's first household waste-sorting program to protecting the Cedars, preserving water resources, and safeguarding the fragile ecosystems of the country's highest peaks.

Reflecting on the committee's journey and the impact of its work, The Beiruter spoke to Ziad Rahme, the committee's president, a professional photographer, and a licensed tour guide in the Bsharri and Cedars region, who reflected on more than three decades of grassroots environmental stewardship. 

A return that sparked a movement

The story of the Bsharri Committee for Environmental Protection began in the early 1990s, during the final years of Lebanon's civil war, when Bsharri did not yet have a municipality of its own. It was then that Dr. Youssef Tawk, prominent environmentalist often referred to as the "Cedar Doctor,"returned from humanitarian missions in Africa, where he had witnessed vast, healthy forests. Coming home to a region scarred by two open dumpsites, one in Qorqasha and another along the old Cedars Road, he decided something had to change.

"The committee closed both dumpsites," recalled Ziad Rahme. The old Cedars Road dumpsite was covered with soil and replanted with cypress trees. "Today, each tree is around four to five meters tall," Rahme said, a monument to the idea that degraded land can be reclaimed.

Lebanon's first waste-sorting project

Perhaps the committee's most ambitious early achievement was launching Lebanon's first household waste-sorting program, in cooperation with LIFE and UNDP. Volunteers went door to door, distributing color-coded bins, white, red, and black, for organic waste, plastics, and other materials, and teaching residents how to use them.

A collection truck ran on a fixed weekly schedule, picking up organic scraps suitable for composting on some days and recyclables like plastic, glass, metal, and cans on others. Plastic, in particular, was treated as a top priority. As Rahme put it, "a small plastic bottle takes around 500 years to decompose." The committee backed the program with school awareness campaigns aimed at teaching children to sort waste at home from an early age, while organic material was composted, bagged, and distributed to local farmers.

The results showed an 80 percent success rate. Yet the program's momentum did not survive institutional change. When Bsharri's first elected municipality took office in 1998, the sorting initiative was quietly discontinued. "Several municipalities have spoken over the years about reviving it," Rahme noted, "but nothing has actually been implemented." More than thirty years on, the committee remains convinced that sorting only works if it begins inside the home, since roadside bins alone cannot stop people from mixing their waste into a single bag.

Oil, batteries, and reusable bags

The committee's environmental work extended well past household trash. Recognizing that used motor oil could poison soil and water if dumped carelessly, it distributed collection containers to gas stations, arranging for a specialized recycling company to gather and refine the oil for industrial reuse.

A similar logic applied to household batteries, once ubiquitous in toys, cameras, and doorbells before the smartphone era. Rahme, who has run a photography studio in Bsharri since 1998, remembers Dr. Youssef asking local photographers not to throw away spent batteries but to set them aside for periodic collection and safe disposal, given how hazardous they are to the environment.

More recently, the committee turned its attention to one of the most stubborn sources of plastic pollution, single-use shopping bags. By encouraging residents and shop owners to adopt reusable bags, it has worked to chip away at plastic waste at its source rather than simply cleaning it up after the fact.

Protecting air, soil, and water

The committee's mission has always reached beyond garbage collection to the broader health of the region's air, soil, and groundwater. It monitors illegal logging, warns residents about forest-fire risks, and encourages tree planting "even one tree in front of each home," Rahme said, "can help reduce pollution."

Wastewater remains a persistent challenge. Despite the installation of sewer networks, many homes remain unconnected, and decades-old septic pits, some 50 to 80 years old, continue to leach into the ground. The committee continues to advocate for a comprehensive sewage treatment project for the Cedars area, aiming to finally stop this slow, invisible contamination of the region's water table.

Watching over the high peaks

Some of the committee's most striking recent work centers on Qornet es Sawda, Lebanon's highest peak. Off-road vehicles once carved across its snowfields, compressing and cracking the snow and accelerating its melt, reducing groundwater recharge in the process. A territorial dispute led the Lebanese Army to restrict public access, and the committee has watched the results with cautious optimism, snow now lingers deep into summer, with dozens of fields stretching hundreds of meters and reaching depths of seven to eight meters even in August.

Working alongside agricultural engineers, the committee is now pushing to designate the area a protected nature reserve, home to flower species found nowhere else in Lebanon. In partnership with the municipality and local security forces, it has also helped cut grazing pressure near the Cedars by roughly 90 percent, giving young cedar seedlings, easily stunted when goats graze their growing tips, a chance to mature.

A legacy still growing

More than three decades after its founding, the Bsharri Committee for Environmental Protection continues its work with the powerful conviction that meaningful change starts locally, at the source, because lasting environmental change begins with one household and one village.