When I was young I used to sit with my dad and ask him how we could actually make Lebanon better. Everyone already knew the problems. I wanted to know where to start. He said if we want to build our country, we have to start in front of our house.
I’m 28 now and I still think about that sentence. In a lot of Lebanese towns, what you find in front of the house is a pile of rubbish.
We all remember 2015. The Naameh landfill closed in July with no plan for what came next, and for months the rubbish sat in the streets of Beirut and parts of Mount Lebanon until people went down to protest under “You Stink”. The main roads got cleared eventually. The side streets never really did.
I’m an engineer, and I’ve always believed the first thing you need to solve a problem is data. Lebanon has a 2018 law on solid waste management and no shortage of national plans. What we’ve never had is a record at street level. Which corner, since when, how many people it bothers, did anyone come.
That’s what residents started building on Baladi Map, the free public map I built. People post a problem with a photo and a location, and it goes to the municipality responsible for that spot. Between the end of July and 27 October 2026, they posted 78 reports about rubbish that wasn’t collected or was dumped where it shouldn’t be.
I went through every one of them.
Where they came from
78 reports from 43 towns, in every governorate except Nabatieh. Waste comes second on the platform, right after roads. Beirut has 15 of the reports and Tripoli has 10, so about a third, and that says as much about where our users live as about where the rubbish is. October alone brought 36, because more people joined.
Every public waste report on Baladi Map, July to October 2026. Source: Baladi Map; boundaries: geoBoundaries.
What people keep describing
The most common one is a container that overflows until the bags spill onto the pavement. A resident in Zahle put it better than I could: “Pile of garbage that never ends. Even when the municipality first came, they cleaned up, but pile appears next day.” Clearing it once isn’t enough. You can clear it in an hour, but if the container is too small or the truck comes too rarely, it’s back the next day.
Then there are the spots that quietly turn into dumps. The ground under the highway overpass in El Mina. An empty parking lot in Furn el Chebbak. Abandoned land in Jdeideh, the edge of a mountain road. Once a few bags are there, people drive in from other neighbourhoods to add theirs. In Jdeideh the municipality put up a metal fence to stop it. The resident who reported it was happy about the fence, then wrote: “A fence may stop people from adding more waste, but it certainly won’t make the mountains of garbage already there disappear on their own.”
A dump under a highway overpass in El Mina, reported in September 2026 and still open. Photo: a resident, via Baladi Map.
Reading how long people had been waiting was the hardest part. 39 of the 78 reports have been open for more than 30 days, and people often say the problem is a lot older than their report. “The issue has been ongoing for 2 years, and has been reported multiple times to the municipality,” someone wrote from Jdeideh. From Beirut: “Waste problem not being solved, more than 3 years.” In El Marj, a resident said the trash hadn’t been collected “for about a month; we’ve started seeing rats, strange insects, swarms of flies, and foul odors.”
Some of it gets burned. “Almost every other day there is someone burning trash and the smell is going into our homes when we open the windows,” wrote a resident of Qornet Chahouane. Human Rights Watch wrote about open burning of waste in Lebanon back in 2017. It’s still going on.
A few reports made me smile, because the people writing them weren’t complaining at all. They were asking for something. Someone in Barsa wrote about “years without recycling bins”, and someone in Halba wants sorting at home to be mandatory. One person in Rabieh just asked the town to keep recycling plastic and paper. People want to sort. In a lot of towns there’s just nowhere to put it.
So whose job is it?
Residents often don’t know, and I get why. A decree from 1974 gives municipalities the job of collecting and disposal of household waste. But in Beirut and a big part of Mount Lebanon the trucks belong to private companies working under contracts with the Council for Development and Reconstruction, so the municipality doesn’t run them. On top of that, the currency collapse since 2019 has sharply cut what municipal budgets can actually buy.
Some towns don’t have a municipality at all. A resident of Ain Aalaq wrote: “Since our town does not have a municipality, we are unsure which authority is responsible for keeping it clean.” Others wrote about money. One person in Khreibet ej Jindi complained about a “failure to collect waste properly, despite charging a fee of 600,000 Lebanese pounds.” I haven’t checked the fee claims myself, but they tell you what people expect back when they pay.
I try to keep this in mind every time I read a report. A pile on a corner isn’t automatically the municipality’s fault. It might be a contractor’s route or a neighbour’s habit. Having all the reports in one place helps us see what keeps happening and figure out who should handle it.
What happened next
This is the number that bothers me most. Out of 78, three have been confirmed cleared.
One was in Bikfaya, empty hunting cartridges scattered across a road, and the municipality closed it itself with photos of a worker sweeping. The other two, in Tripoli and Jdeideh, were confirmed by residents who went back and sent an “after” photo within two days of reporting. No other municipality has replied publicly to a waste report yet.
Jdeideh: a roadside pile reported on 1 October 2026 (left) and crews clearing it the next day (right). Photos: residents, via Baladi Map.
Three out of 78 is low, I know. What gives me some hope is how fast those two were. Both had a photo and an exact location, so whoever was responsible knew where to go.
What I’d tell anyone working on waste here
What makes a report useful is the photo and the date. The neighbours joining in helps a lot too. These 78 reports have 378 “I’m affected” taps between them. The busiest one, a street in Qasqas in Beirut where rubbish spills out of the containers onto the road, has 38.
I also look at how long the problem has been there. A pile that’s been sitting for two years is a different problem from one that showed up yesterday, and you only see that if you keep the dates.
The same spots keep coming back, overpasses and empty lots mostly. If you’re deciding where to put a container or where the truck should pass more often, that list is a good place to start.
Then there’s the “after” photo. It costs nothing and takes a resident thirty seconds. It also tells the people who did the work that somebody noticed.
To be fair, 78 reports is not a survey. Most come from people with smartphones, more of them in cities, and they show what people see on the street. Why it happens is a separate question. But each report is public, with a date and a pin on the map, so people can go back and check.
My dad told me to start in front of our house. That’s exactly what the people behind these reports did. They took a photo of what was outside their door and wrote it down. Now I want to see more of them fixed.
