In the past few weeks, the streets of Beirut witnessed an evolving amount of debris that contained a mountain of broken glasses and crumbled bricks. The waste has been growing since the port explosion on August 4th, 2020, and is estimated to weigh around 200,000 tons! Unfortunately, the lack of the Lebanese government efforts to fix the accumulating waste issue, combined with the country’s history of poor waste management, resulted in the launch of “Rubble to Mountains”.
Rubble to Mountains is an initiative that’s co-launched by UN-Habitat Lebanon, Development Inc, Lebanon Reforestation Initiative, AUB Neighborhood Initiative, and partnered with Diageo Lebanon, Nestlé Pure Life Lebanon, Spinneys – Lebanon, and Reel-ly, aiming at steering away from an environmental waste crisis.
The initiative follows a few simple steps to solve the waste problem that start by first collecting Beirut’s construction and demolition waste, second; sort them by type, third; transform them into material for landfills to rehabilitate Lebanese mountains that have been quarried, fourth; extract the recyclable materials whereby some will be used to rehabilitate Beirut, while non-recyclables will be crushed into the sand to rehabilitate the mountains.
Rubble to Mountain’s main end-goal is to actually use the waste to restore Lebanon‘s packed mountainsides which have been estimated to take around eighteen months to complete. However, thanks to the initiative’s partners and the 4,000 volunteers, over 100,000 tons of debris and more than 25,000 tons of broken glass has been collected and stocked at the dedicated dumpsite in Karantina.
Part of the dumbed waste will be recycled into public benches, bins, bus stops, and many other things. Finally, without this amazing initiative, the waste could have been thrown away in the beautiful mountains, damaging and polluting our mother nature and ecosystem.