Lebanon has a 32-million-ton problem — what to do with the mountains of rubble left behind by yet another disastrous war between Israel and Hezbollah.
The newly minted Lebanese government is contemplating a controversial plan for the war debris from hundreds of the capital’s apartment blocks demolished by Israeli airstrikes: dumping it into the Mediterranean. If this goes ahead, the rubble would be used to reclaim coastal land to expand a landfill site near Beirut’s international airport.
Environmental experts have raised serious concerns about potential ecological harm if the wreckage is not properly sorted to remove a host of toxic materials first. Some activists argue that, instead of prioritizing real estate deals, the government should recycle the rubble to rebuild people’s homes destroyed during the war.
The Ministry of Environment faces this Herculean task while cash-strapped because of Lebanon’s years-long financial crisis, and the clock is ticking. Tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians have been left homeless and reconstruction cannot begin in earnest until the rubble has been removed.
On Mamoun Street, in the Basta neighborhood of central Beirut, local nongovernmental organization Offre Joie has taken the issue of postwar recycling and rebuilding into its own hands.
Basta is a mostly Sunni Muslim, working-class quarter, renowned for its antiques dealers and a few crumbling Ottoman-era mansions. During the recent war, many families sought shelter here after fleeing Israel’s devastating air campaign in southern Lebanon.
They thought they would be safe in Basta. But on the evening of Oct. 10, 2024, an Israeli airstrike leveled an entire apartment block there, killing 22 people, including women and children. There had been no warning. It was the deadliest airstrike on Beirut until another in late November hit the same street just two doors down, killing another 29 people.
At the strike site the following morning, on Oct. 11, there was an acrid smell in the air. The wreckage was still smoldering and a layer of ash and concrete dust covered everything in a sheet of gray. A greengrocer on the street appeared to be selling oranges and apples made of stone. Mohamad Fakhry, 23, was sitting on the mound of debris that used to be his neighbor’s home. He was catatonic; he had seen children’s bodies pulled out of the rubble the night before, and his own apartment had almost been destroyed with his family inside it.
But last week, Mamoun Street looked very different. The rubble was gone and the volunteers and workers from Offre Joie were placing the final cinder blocks on Fakhry’s family home. Cynthia Mahdi, 26, was in charge there, overseeing the restoration of 20 buildings in the area. In the scarce moments between her phone ringing and issuing orders to the foremen, she told New Lines how her teams were filling the gap left by the government to lift the neighborhood out of the ashes.
“This is number five. … We did the door again, we did all the walls, plumbing, electricity, concrete, new plaster, joinery. We’re working on everything from A to Z,” Mahdi shouted over the tumult of jackhammers and electricity generators.
For Mahdi, her work with Offre Joie carries a personal importance. “I’m from the south. I also lost my home there,” she said. “I lived this. … I know how it is not to have a house, a roof, a dining table. It’s hard. … And there’s more than 130 families that are displaced right now, just from here.”
Offre Joie has been lobbying the local municipality to recycle the rubble they cleared in Basta to be used as building material. They hoped this might serve as a model for the rest of Lebanon. For now, it is sitting at a temporary site in the Karantina area, alongside rubble from the 2020 port explosion that is still waiting to be sorted.
Meanwhile, Mahdi and her overall-clad volunteers salvage what they can. “The government is not on the ground,” she said. “Nobody started rebuilding anything. There is no government. I think we were clear on this way back. It’s Lebanon. … So, if you don’t do this, who’s going to do it?”
If activists like Mahdi seem skeptical, it is not without reason — Lebanon’s approach to postwar reconstruction in the past has left much to be desired. For many Lebanese, this is the familiar triptych of corruption, mismanagement and private interest, often at the expense of the environment and the average citizen.
Following Lebanon’s ruinous 15-year civil war from 1975 to 1990, debris was dumped at a landfill site on Beirut’s northern coast to expand the downtown area, creating a wealthy enclave of glitzy high-rises and luxury boutiques that shut ordinary people out.
After a month-long war with Israel in 2006, much of the debris — which included unexploded ordnance and hazardous waste from hundreds of Beirut’s ruined buildings — ended up in the sea. Some was dumped at the Costa Brava site south of Beirut — a temporary solution that developed into a permanent landfill site, contributing to the degradation and pollution of Beirut’s coastline. Today, government officials are considering expanding this site as a quick solution to clear out the capital’s debris.
However, the latest war has caused much greater destruction. In an interview with New Lines, Lebanon’s new Environment Minister Tamara Elzein said the debris to date since fighting began in October 2023 totals some 32 million tons — the equivalent of 87 Empire State Buildings. This far exceeds the 6 million tons left by the 2006 war. There are almost 100,000 housing units across the country that are damaged or destroyed, plus tens of thousands of businesses, agricultural establishments and civilian infrastructure assets. In the Dahiyeh area south of Beirut, which bore the brunt of Israel’s airstrikes around the capital, almost 3,000 buildings have been destroyed or badly damaged. That is a little over 8% of the suburb’s buildings. (In Gaza, by contrast, almost 60% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed.)
In March, the World Bank assessed that Lebanon’s reconstruction and recovery would cost an estimated $11 billion. So far, contributions from donor countries and funds pledged by the World Bank amount to approximately $2.8 billion. Meanwhile, Hezbollah has allocated $77 million to support displaced families. The rest will have to come from private financing and whatever can be eked out from the state’s depleted coffers.
The question is whether the new government, headed by President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, will repeat past mistakes or adopt a more responsible and sustainable approach to fixing Lebanon’s ruined neighborhoods.
Antoine Kallab is the associate director of the American University of Beirut’s Nature Conservation Center. He shares the concerns of other environmentalists about the risk of long-term damage to nature and wildlife if rubble clearance is not carried out responsibly.
“The environmental consequences are a way of prolonging the war beyond any ceasefire, because even after the bombings, the environmental scars persist. … By adopting policies advancing recycling, we can have a positive outcome for all,” Kallab told New Lines. “On a technical level, it’s feasible; the bulk is composed of concrete, and we know how to recycle it to minimize future extraction from quarries and create jobs.”
The problem is “how to adopt a strategy where displaced people can return to their neighborhoods as soon as possible and begin to rebuild. … On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that we can’t reconcile humanitarian priorities with environmental priorities,” he added.
Paul Abi Rached, the director of the environmental advocacy group TERRE Liban, has little faith in the government plans under discussion. He says environmental issues are too often relegated to the bottom of the list of Lebanon’s political priorities.
“[After the 2006 war] we weren’t aware of where this rubble was being dumped. No one was paying attention to the problem. But after the 2015 [waste] crisis, we understood that there’s a problem with this political class in Lebanon that never thinks about ecological priorities,” he told New Lines.
As well as the option to reclaim coastal land to expand the Costa Brava dump, other plans might see the rubble used to refill Lebanon’s disused quarries. But Abi Rached fears that toxic chemicals, if not properly sorted from the rest of the debris, will leak into Lebanon’s sea or countryside.
“Our houses are full of toxic waste, solar panels, microplastics, heavy metals, asbestos,” Abi Rached said. “In a quarry, it’s as if you remove the skin, and any microbe will cause us inflammation. It’s buried and therefore will arrive more quickly in the water table.”
Instead of sending the debris to expand the Costa Brava site, Abi Rached suggests that, once the toxic materials are removed, it should be used to develop communal spaces, such as public squares and parks, or to rebuild destroyed villages in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.
The perspective of the Environment Ministry differs somewhat from the view on the ground. Last week, at her office in downtown Beirut, Elzein made sure to leave her windows ajar. Like almost all Beirutis, the minister has learned through painful experience that this is how to prevent an explosion’s shockwave from shooting shattered glass into the room. She was preparing for expected airstrikes on the capital — Israel’s response to a couple of rockets launched from Lebanon that morning.
Elzein acknowledged the enormous complexity of the task ahead of her, made all the more difficult by financial constraints and institutional weaknesses. But she was surprised at the amount of attention the issue of rubble was receiving. For her, the environmental concerns are misguided. She insisted that international standards to treat construction waste were already in place, and that the focus should be on clearance in order to begin the more urgent task of rebuilding people’s homes.
“People don’t care to know the details of what you did, how you did the triage, how you removed it. … People care about building their homes and returning to their villages. This is the first concern,” Elzein told New Lines.
Unlike Beirut, where clearance and even reconstruction have tentatively begun, the villages of southern Lebanon still lie waiting in ruins. Some have been totally erased by Israeli demolitions. Residents there are becoming impatient at the apparent inequality, and private contractors have been accused of profiteering by delaying work to raise the price of rubble before it is removed.
“At first, the government only estimated a maximum of $4 [per cubic meter]. … The problem wasn’t the contractors. … The problem was the money. It wasn’t enough,” Elzein explained. “If we were in a country with money, you would not have to worry about dealing with negotiations and funding agencies and the World Bank. … But instead of having 250 employees, I have 70. … This is our problem.”
Before our meeting ended, Elzein said, “What shocks me in all the round-the-clock discussions in the country is that many of those who are talking about the rubble have never talked about all the pollution that has come from the [Israeli] bombing.”
An hour later, Israel’s warplanes did indeed bomb the southern suburbs of Beirut, for the first time since a ceasefire was agreed in late November, leaving more homes destroyed and another several thousand tons of rubble added to the pile.
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