SIDON: The squalid carbuncle that is Sidon dump rises from the sea just a five minute drive from the center of one of Lebanon’s most picturesque and historic towns. Originally created to dispose of debris from buildings bombed in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the city has been piling its rubbish here ever since: creating a 600,000 cubic meter heap that reaches the height of a four-storey building. It’s history is visible to the naked eye: layers of waste sandwiched between dirt show like chalk-cliff sediment lines as a rough track hewn into the compressed waste of years gone-by allows garbage trucks to ascend this mountain of junk.

For the last 19  years Mohammad Hamdan, 29, has worked here amid the filth and flies; sorting metal for scrap, and, more recently, plastic for recycling.

“The smell really, really gets to you but to us it’s our livelihood so we have no choice. It brings us our food,” he said, pausing from his sorting beneath the midday sun. Flies cover everything, his face, hands and clothes. Even now he finds them irritating, said Hamdan, showing a hand perforated with bites. 

Every day Hamdan and some 20 other scavagengers sift through some twelve truck-loads of rubbish delivered by – which appears for the most part to be domestic waste. With bare hands and rudimentary hoes, the men, clad in old, soiled clothes, stand knee deep in filth to find their catch. A the end of each long day, often from sun-up to sun-down, their efforts are weighed and each man is paid accordingly – usually around LL15,000, with which Hamdan buys food for himself, his son and daughter, who live in the Beirut suburb of Ain al-Remmaneh.

Hamdan said workers often suffer from health complaints and have to be wary of dangerous waste. Wehbe Shouhaib, director of the Hospital of the South has been reported as saying that “Illnesses such as asthma, pulmonary infections and problems with the nervous system are among the consequences of the dump’s stench.” 

However, Jihan Ahmad Dahbour, 69, said the continued exposure to the less than sanitary conditions have not impacted on his health. “I’ve been here 23 years and nothing has happened to me, or anyone else. Nothing.”  Dahbour said he took a blood test every year and had never shown any signs of illness related to the dump.

“We live in a country with a great percentage of unemployment and I’m just happy to be working. At my age it’s hard to find work,” said Dahbour

Walid, a Lebanese University student studying physics regularly fishes next to the dump and says that anyone rash enough to swim in the water will soon be taking a trip to hospital.

A brown fetid liquid runs from a pipe beside the dump into the sea and detritus clutters the rocky shore. 

“The waves knock down the rubbish and it falls into the water and it ends up all over the beaches,” said Walid. “The smell is really horrible when the wind changes direction you can smell it all over the town.

“Families used to come and swim here but now it’s been turned into a dump no one comes.”

Last year 150 tons of rubbish slid into the sea after storms and an earthquake caused the dump’s west side to collapse. The Sidon municipality announced a state of environmental emergency and said it was taking measures to limit sea pollution, but environmentalists claimed the effects were widespread.

Environmental activist Mohammad Sarji told The Daily Star at the time, “In addition to the garbage floating on water, big quantities have also filled the seabed,” he added. “The entire Lebanese coast will be polluted but southern fishermen in particular will be mostly affected by this catastrophe. Like fish, Sidon’s fishermen are also victims of negligence.”

“Amid the storms we are witnessing, waste is expected to reach all surrounding countries, such as Syria, Cyprus and Greece,” Sarji added. Sarji, said it was “very obvious” that the dump would collapse again soon.

Fires are also a problem. Gases created by decomposting garbage are extremely flammable – Discarded narguileh coals are a prime suspect of ignition, said Dahbour. September saw one of the worst fires at the dump so far with a cloud of toxic fumes covering the town, with Lebanon’s Green Party describing the scene as “like a volcano.”

Plans are being formulated to replace the dump – which general manager Afif Salami has said is already over capacity – with a new “sanitary landfill,” accompanied by a garbage-processing and recycling factory. A long awaited maritime wall is also being discussed. The project has received some $60 million of donations from the state, Saudi Arabia and the Alwaleed Bin Talal Humanitarian Foundation, but progress has been slow, with the biggest stumbling block proving to be finding a new site.

“We suggested moving the dump to an abandoned quarry in a nearby village where we could sort the trash to dispose of the toxic waste and recycle that which can be recycled [but the village refused],” Sidon Mayor Abdel-Rahman al-Bizri was reported as saying last month. “The Environment Ministry has not given its approval,” said Bizri. “The government doesn’t want us to provide the solution. It does not suit them.” 

Walid said Sidon residents such as himself shared their mayor’s pessimism. “I think closing the dump is a good idea but it makes too much money for the whole system,” he said. 

While closure of the dump is seen by many as an imperative, for the freelance scavengers it represents the best hope they have of earning a living.  “When the dump closes we will go around looking for material to recycle in garbage bins,” said Hamdam, contemplating a life outside Sidon’s mountain of filth. – Additional reporting by Omar Katerji