Sidon mayor promises to end dump crisis
By Mohammed Zaatari
Daily Star staff
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
SIDON: The mayor of Sidon, Abdel-Rahman Bizri, has vowed that the Southern port
city's notorious and perennial waste-treatment crisis "will be resolved soon."
Bizri said in a statement issued Monday that efforts to remove the massive dump
were now under way thanks to a donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal.
The $5 million donation was originally made in 2004 by the Alwaleed bin Talal
Humanitarian Foundation but had been withheld due to disagreements between the
foundation and the municipality of Sidon over conditions to be met by the
municipality before it could receive the promised funds.
The statement from Bizri said the municipality had fulfilled the foundation's
conditions by acquiring necessary licenses and conducting an
environmental-impact assessment on a plan for the dump's removal. "The
municipality worked in cooperation with South for Construction [a major
contracting firm] to set up a mechanism that ensures the partial use of the
dump without hampering its elimination process," Bizri said.
"We ensure our Sidon neighbors that the dump treatment will not have any
environmental repercussions on their regions," Bizri said. "On the contrary, we
will work simultaneously on establishing a modern waste-treatment plant."
However, environmental activists told The Daily Star the announcement was an
"exaggeration" and that efforts being carried out were aimed at repairing
previous damage caused by the municipality's negligence, not treatment or
removal of the waste heap.
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An environmental activist at the dump said the first phase of the removal
process was to reduce the dump to its original size. "Work is being done to
reduce the trash heap to its initial size, since the dump has grown by more
than 40 percent and now covers land that had originally been set aside for the
waste-treatment plant," the activist told The Daily Star.
"Bulldozers working around the dump are doing nothing but repairing what has
been spoiled by the municipality. Several dumps have resulted from the main
one," said the activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We are
monitoring the treatment process and awaiting the results."
According to the activist, the reclamation of land for a waste-treatment plant
would take at least another month.
The Sidon dump has been an ongoing crisis for more than 35 years. Over the
decades it has repeatedly caught fire, and in 2005 and 2006 it partially
collapsed into the Mediterranean, sending waste as far as Greece.
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