by Mimi Kirk

It’s been a little over a year since the beginning of Beirut’s garbage crisis, which saw piles and piles of trash—indeed, an entire river
of the stuff—flooding the Lebanese capital and its suburbs. When the
government closed the city’s main landfill in July 2015, it had 15
million tons of garbage in it—13 million more than it was meant to. Because the government had not secured a new landfill, trash collection stopped. Mounds of rubbish accumulated in the streets.

The stench and sight of the trash spurred a protest movement, aptly
dubbed You Stink. Hassan Chamoun, the movement’s photographer and
videographer, tells CityLab that he and his fellow activists would
collect garbage around the city—from, say, the teeming Beirut River—and
pass it to NGOs to dispose of. “We were saying to the government that we
don’t need you, we can take care of things ourselves,” he says.

The crisis, while not resolved, has calmed since the spring of 2016,
when the government started using temporary landfills. At the same time,
there’s been a shift among Beirut’s residents in their approach to
garbage. Some who didn’t give their trash a second thought before the
crisis are now recycling and even spearheading sorting and disposal
initiatives. “Even I began to separate my garbage for recycling after
the crisis started,” says Chamoun.

Recycle Beirut, profiled
by Al Jazeera, is one such initiative. Co-founder Sam Kazak and his
team pass by homes and businesses to gather recyclables before sorting
and selling them. The organization collects from over 500 locations and
has 16 employees, up from only two a year ago.

Shadia Khater, of Beirut suburb Beit el Chaar, established a center
that sorts and ships household recyclables. Her passion for the practice
is such that she has blocked neighborhood roads with her car, only
allowing people to pass when they agree to recycle. “It was in the early
morning,” she told
PRI. “They couldn’t go out…to school, to work [until they started
sorting].” Khater even got a priest to discuss recycling in one of his
sermons.

While such new, local recycling efforts are a positive development,
Beirut’s residents still want the government to take better care of the
country’s population.

You Stink’s grievances with the
government were not only about its handling of garbage but also its
general incompetence. Water shortages and power cuts are common in
Lebanon, and the country hasn’t had a president since 2014 due to
political infighting. The influx of more than one million
Syrian refugees—which translates to one in five people in Lebanon—has
put a strain on infrastructure as well as the political system, with
leaders at odds regarding the war and loyalty to Syrian President Bashar
Al-Assad.

“People in Lebanon just want a proper government that will give them
dignified lives,” says Chamoun. “Not lives where we live in garbage and
lack basic services like electricity and water.”