There’s this “Sar Lezem Rassa Yifroz” campaign on Facebook that caught my attention, not because of the catchy name but because I found it a bit weird.
The people behind that campaign believe that the closure of Naameh landfill will result in a crisis similar to what happened last year when waste piled up in Beirut, and want to manage that crisis by asking people to start sorting their waste material starting January 17th when Sukleen might stop collecting garbage due to the closure of the landfill.
The sorting is quite simple, in black bags you’re supposed to put food scraps along with paper to reduce the moisture and therefore delay the food fermentation, and in blue bags you put everything else (plastic, glass, metal, etc…).
Now what will happen as of January is that there will be around 100 trucks which will roam the streets of Beirut and Mount Lebanon to collect the blue bags ONLY (the ones containing recyclable material and can be sold) and leave the black ones on the street. So basically what irritates people the most and makes this crisis a crisis, that is the bad smell of fermented food scraps, will remain there! So I don’t really see how will this campaign manage the crisis other than by reducing the piles a bit and making use of the recyclable stuff (for their own benefits?).
Furthermore, they seem pretty confident that the campaign will reach a large number of people as they prepared a hundred trucks to roam the streets, but their facebook page seemed to have have no more than 480 likes at the time of publishing this post, so they will most probably be surprised when they notice the blue bags they targeted were full of all kind of waste and not just recyclable materials (don’t say I didn’t warn you guys!).
Not to mention that one of the campaign managers is also accused of copying the slogan from an Arabnet competition last year…
The whole thing really doesn’t make a lot of sense now eh..?