Drive-throw Recycling Aims to Ease Lebanon Garbage Crisis
Drive-throw Recycling Aims to Ease lebanon Garbage Crisis
Beirut motorists pull up to a drive-through counter — not for fast-food, but to exchange empty bottles and cardboard for cash, a novelty in a country long plagued by garbage crises. Festering landfills often overflow in crisis-hit lebanon, waste is burnt illegally at informal dump sites and rubbish floats off the coast in the Mediterranean Sea.State-run recycling has largely fallen by the wayside in a nation that has been grappling with a three-year-long economic collapse.
“The government used to be in charge of this sector and now it is bankrupt," said Pierre Baaklini, 32, founder of lebanon Waste Management.Around a year ago he started the first “Drive Throw" recycling station and opened a second in february in Burj Hammoud, a Beirut suburb known for its proximity to a landfill.
With more than 80 percent of Lebanon’s population living in poverty, the poorest eke out a meagre living picking through dumpsters for anything they can sell for recycling or scrap.
Baaklini said his customers are generally environmentally conscious and among the minority “with sufficient income".People drive up to the station in their cars, register their details and place bags and boxes of loosely sorted recyclables on the counter.