Lebanon's new blueprint for waste management

A newly launched series of national studies and an interactive digital mapping platform seeks to provide Lebanon with the analytical foundation it has long lacked to confront its chronic waste crisis. It represents an effort to equip policymakers with the data needed to move beyond the reactive responses that have defined the sector.

Lebanon's relationship with its own refuse has long served as a barometer of the state's broader dysfunction. Successive waste crises have exposed mounting environmental degradation and the country's chronic failures of governance, planning, and public administration.

A sector defined by excess and deferred reform

Lebanon generates upward of two million tons of solid waste annually. Roughly 94 percent is consigned to landfill, while only a marginal share is recycled. The landfill system itself is straining well past its engineered limits. The country's eight operational sites currently absorb an estimated 3,182 tons daily, a volume that exceeds their design capacity, while more than a thousand unregulated dumps persist nationwide, disproportionately sited in economically marginalized coastal and peripheral communities with the least leverage to resist them.

Facilities such as Bourj Hammoud, conceived as an emergency response to the 2015 crisis and built on reclaimed land along Beirut's waterfront, have themselves metastasized into sources of pollution, malodor, and recurring landfill fires fueled by methane generated from decomposing organic matter.

Lebanon enacted an Integrated Solid Waste Management Law in 2018, yet its implementation has languished for years, leaving municipalities, private operators, and residents to navigate the resulting vacuum largely on their own.

The construction of the new initiative

Lebanon has introduced a national planning package aimed squarely at closing the evidentiary gap. Financed by the European Union and executed by the UNDP in partnership with the Ministry of Environment, the package unites granular national studies with a Geographic Information System (GIS) platform intended to give policymakers a spatial, continuously updatable rendering of the country's waste landscape.

Rather than approaching waste as an undifferentiated mass, the studies disaggregate the sector into its constituent streams, healthcare waste, e-waste, green waste, slaughterhouse waste, cardboard and paper waste, and waste-derived fuels, each of which carries distinct regulatory demands and recovery potential. Healthcare waste requires rigorous containment to avert contamination; e-waste holds recoverable material value alongside genuine hazard; green waste sits at the heart of the methane and landfill-fire dynamic already described.

By quantifying and mapping each stream discretely, the package is designed to let national and municipal authorities identify precisely where infrastructure is absent, where efforts are needlessly duplicated, and where capital would yield the greatest return.

In principle, this allows the Ministry of Environment, the newly constituted National Solid Waste Management Authority, municipalities, and private operators to work from a common evidentiary foundation, coordinating interventions rather than working at cross purposes.

This reorientation, from waste treatment toward waste industrialization, marks a departure from years of reactive crisis management.

The long-standing gaps in Lebanon’s waste system

To situate this initiative within the broader arc of Lebanon's waste policy, and to interrogate what still stands between data and durable reform, The Beiruter spoke with Doumet Kamel, an environmental expert closely versed in the country's waste sector.

Kamel's assessment of the status quo is unsparing. Lebanon, he argues, has for years disposed of its waste in dumps that are illegal in substance if not in name, sites that have simply been designated "legal" without any of the sorting or treatment infrastructure that designation would imply. "There is no sorting, nothing," he said. "Waste is just being buried and disposed of in an unclear and improper way."

He points to the record as evidence, the collapse of the Naameh landfill, the deterioration at Amroussieh, and the waste piling up near Beirut's airport in mounds he describes as "terrifying." Jdeideh, he notes, has effectively become a mountain of refuse, a description he extends to Tripoli as well, where the pattern repeats itself in near-identical form.

For Kamel, the deeper obstacle is political. The country, he contends, has long known what proper waste management would require; what's been missing is the will to build it. "No one wants to implement the proper solution," he said. "No one wants it. Up until now, that's the reality."

That diagnosis extends directly to the question of investment. Kamel maintains that international organizations and companies have been prepared for some time to invest in Lebanon's waste sector, but have been unable to secure the regulatory approval needed to do so. In his view, removing that obstacle would transform the trajectory of the file entirely. With international investors permitted to enter the sector, he said he is confident the waste issue "would be in a very comfortable position for the next hundred years." The capital and expertise, as he describes it, are simply waiting on a green light, a project that would serve the Lebanese people directly.

From planning to implementation

The launch of the national studies and GIS platform marks the latest effort to strengthen Lebanon's approach to solid waste management through better data and planning. By compiling detailed information on waste generation, infrastructure, and treatment capacities, the initiative is intended to support municipalities, policymakers, and other stakeholders in making more informed decisions.

As Lebanon continues to grapple with longstanding waste management challenges, the new tools provide a centralized source of information that can inform future policies, infrastructure planning, and investment decisions across the sector.