The overflow of garbage cans onto curbsides followed the closure of the giant open-air landfill on Beirut’s  northern coast on April 30 after reaching capacity, according to a report in Al Arabiya English. 

The last waste crisis the country faced was in 2015, which prompted the popular You Stink movement, when a primary landfill site closed and government authorities did nothing to implement a contingency plan. Lebanon still lacks good waste management facilities, with 90 percent of the waste ending up in landfills that emit toxic gases breathed in by the neighbouring population. The Burj Hammoud-Jdeideh landfill was originally predicted to fill up in 2019, but a nearly 30 percent reduction in daily waste production following mass protests and the coronavirus lockdown delayed its shutdown, according to Samar Khalil, a member of the Waste Management Coalition that was formed in the wake of the 2015 crisis, the report stated.

In response to the recent overflow, the government approved on 5 May the expansion of the site by a height of 1.5 meters, a decision that has been condemned by environmentalists and local Members of Parliament as yet another stop-gap measure in Lebanon’s long history of poor waste management policy, as per the report.  

The Burj Hammoud-Jdeideh landfill is said to be currently 16 meters in height, accepting around 1,400 tons of waste per day. According to the Environmental Health Journal study published in 2017, people working in areas close to the landfill were more likely to suffer from respiratory, dermatological, and gastrointestinal disease. It is estimated that the dump leaked 120,000 tons of hazardous leachates into the sea annually, destroying sea life for hundreds of meters. With another 1.5 meters of waste set to added as the government promises to find alternative solutions, the report indicated that experts are worried about the ability of the concrete walls to contain it, and the potential health and environmental impact.