Kataeb party chief MP Sami Gemayel stressed on Thursday that establishing a landfill in Bourj Hammoud region will trigger the emission of poisonous gases and smoke that will affect the whole area around it for the next two decades.

“The mountain of garbage in Bourj Hammoud must be addressed because it will emit poisonous gases and smoke for the next twenty years,” said Gemayel in a press conference.

He pointed out that Sukleen has been recycling only %4 of the garbage collected and will do the same when it starts dumping in Bourj Hammoud, he said: “Sukleen will landfill %96 of non-recycled trash in Bourj Hammoud which will lead to diseases because of pollution. The process will continue for a period of four years along a distance that stretches from the City Mall (in Dora) to the Beirut Port.”

He emphasized that alternatives for landfills are “easy and lie in a decentralization plan suggested by Agriculture Minister Akram Shehayyeb instead of spending 115 million dollars to establish one.”

Gemayel commented on the matter rather sarcastically, he remarked: “The seafront will be blocked with a 15m high wall and the people will eye the sunset on a mountain of garbage instead of on the horizon.”

He expressed astonishment at how suggestions to “establish landfills in remote unpopulated areas were turned down, while ones close to densely populated regions next to the sea were accepted.”

The MP concluded and said that the Kataeb campaigners will keep their sit-ins near the landfill until an alternative is found.

Last week the protesters from the Kataeb Party managed to force their way into the landfill and demanded a halt to what they called “the project of land-filling the sea with garbage on Metn’s coast.”

The government’s handling of the waste management file was one of the reasons that Kataeb cited when it asked its ministers to resign from Prime Minister Tammam Salam’s cabinet earlier this year.

Kataeb Party chief MP Sami Gemayel has accused the government of taking a decision to “fill the Mediterranean Sea with garbage without conducting an environmental impact study and without sorting or treating the waste.”

http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/214996-gemayel-decentralized-trash-management-alternative-for-landfills-protests-will-continue