Agriculture Minister Akram Shehayyeb assured on Monday that the trash management plan is going smoothly and slammed reports claiming that it is going in circles and is doomed to fail.

“The waste management plan is going the right way contrary to what some people think. The plan was initially put in order to prevent the crisis from reverting,” he told the pan-Arab al-Hayat daily in an interview.

Shehayyeb stated that the “Naameh landfill will be closed permanently on the due date and will not receive trash from the villages of Shouf or Aley or any other region.”

“A large part of the crisis in Beirut, Keserwan and Metn has been resolved, including parts of Shouf and Aley. We still have sections of upper Aley, Shouf and Iqlim al-Kharroub where we are setting up two large spaces where we can package the waste before it is transported.”

On the landfills of Bourj Hammoud and that of Costa Brava, the Agriculture Minister said that the efforts are ongoing to prepare these two landfills to receive the waste after the closure of the Naameh landfill.

He concluded: “Beirut, which produces around 500 tons of garbage on a daily basis, will be free of old and new garbage this week.”

Lebanon’s unprecedented trash management crisis erupted in July 2015 after the closure of the Naameh landfill, which was receiving the waste of Beirut and Mount Lebanon.

The crisis, which sparked unprecedented protests against the entire political class, has seen streets, forests and riverbanks overflowing with waste and the air filled with the smell of rotting and burning garbage.

On March 12, the cabinet decided to establish two landfills in Costa Brava and Bourj Hammoud and to reactivate the Naameh landfill for two months as part of a four-year plan to resolve the country’s waste problem despite the rejection of many residents and civil society activists.

D.A.

M.T.

http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/208281-shehayyeb-affirms-waste-plan-on-right-track