Wasting time

There, blocking the right-hand lane of traffic, was history repeating itself. Four days after the municipality of Bourj Hammoud blocked access to a temporary waste storage facility on August 24, uncollected garbage was spilling onto the Mirna Chalouhi Road in an eastern suburb of Beirut. If the latest pile-up of trash on the ground suggests anything, it’s that the government’s most recent waste management plan (agreed to in March) is not going well. Less ambitious than previous policy attempts in the past 18 months, the plan focuses on Lebanon’s most populous areas (Beirut and the districts of Keserwan, Metn, Baabda, Aley and Chouf – a.k.a. Sukleen country), not the entire nation. It also relies on a popular technology that faced stiff local opposition in the past. By 2020, in theory, the burden of daily national power cuts will be a bit easier to bear as waste incineration is expected to