Naharnet

Govt. OKs Solid Waste Plan, Decides to Expand Costa Brava Landfill

The Cabinet on Thursday approved a plan to manage the household solid waste crisis, which involves the expansion of the Costa Brava landfill near Beirut.

The plan was proposed by the Ministry of Environment.

“We now have a plan approved by the government to manage the household solid waste in Lebanon, and the details of this plan will be presented during a press conference in the ministry,” Environment Minister Tarek al-Khatib said after the cabinet session.

He added that the Cabinet also decided to expand the Costa Brava landfill and to include Chouf and Aley to area benefiting from it.

“A decision has also been taken about the Tripoli landfill and thus we now have a plan to commit to in order to solve the waste problem,” Khatib said.

Under the new plan, a new reprocessing plant will be established at Costa Brava and the sorting plants in Amrusiya and Karantina will be improved.

A call for tenders will also be organized within six months to establish thermal disintegration plants in several areas.

Lebanon has been suffering from a waste management crisis since July 2015 when the controversial Naameh landfill that received the trash of Beirut and Mount Lebanon was closed by authorities.

Experts have urged the government to devise a comprehensive waste management solution that would include more recycling and composting to reduce the amount of trash going into landfills.

The consecutive governments' failure to address the problem in recent years led to the piling up of garbage on the streets and in random locations, which raised health and environmental concerns and sparked unprecedented street protests against the entire political class.

Source: Naharnet


Copyright © 2012 Naharnet.com. All Rights Reserved. https://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/240753