Lebanon is once again staring down a waste management crisis, with news that the Costa Brava and Bourj Hammoud landfills will reach capacity in 2018—two years before the government’s initial estimate of 2020. In response, the cabinet is reportedly considering a proposal to reopen the infamous Naameh landfill, whose closure in 2015 sparked a crisis that left garbage piling up in the streets of Beirut. The government adopted a temporary fix to the crisis in March 2016, when it began dumping waste from Beirut and Mount Lebanon into the two new coastal landfills. Now that these landfills are filling up faster than expected, the government is discussing yet another emergency solution. The waste management problem was never actually solved—the government just pushed the garbage out of sight. The 2016 “fix” was just another short-term emergency measure, the latest in a string of emergency plans adopted after the end of the
