Lebanese recycle glass from Beirut blast
Standing in a pile of broken glass in northern Lebanon, a man heaved shovel-loads of shards — retrieved from Beirut after the massive explosion at its port — into a red-hot furnace.
Melted down at a factory in the second city Tripoli, they reemerged as molten glass ready to be recycled into traditional slimnecked water jugs.
The Aug. 4 port explosion ripped through countless glass doors and windows when it laid waste to whole Beirut neighborhoods. Volunteers, nongovernmental groups and entrepreneurs have tried to salvage at least part of the tons of glass that littered the streets, some of it through recycling at Wissam Hammoud’s family’s glass factory.
“Here we have glass from the Beirut explosion,” said Hammoud, deputy head at the United Glass Production Company (Uniglass), as several men sorted through a mound of shards outside the building.
“Organizations are bringing it to us so that we can remanufacture it,” said the 24-year-old.
As workers washed and stacked jars behind him, Hammoud said between 20 and 22 tons of glass had been brought to the factory, a hive of rhythmic activity centered around the furnace that burns at 900-1,200 degrees Celsius. Nearby, three men produced jars stamped out of a mold in a carefully choreographed sequence, while another two handled the more delicate process of blowing and forming the traditional Lebanese pitchers. “We work 24 hours a day,” Hammoud said. “We can’t stop because stopping costs too much money.”
Ziad Abichaker,
CEO
of environmental engineering company Cedar Environmental, has spearheaded multiple glass recycling initiatives in Lebanon. In the first days after the blast, he teamed up with civil-society organizations and a host of volunteers to come up with a plan to keep as much glass as possible out of landfills already overburdened by a decades-old solid waste crisis. “We decided that at least part of the shattered glass ... our local industries should benefit from as a raw material,” Abichaker told AFP. “We’re diverting glass from ending up in the landfill, we’re supplying our local industries with free raw material,” he added. According to him, more than 5,000 tons of glass was shattered by the explosion.
From mid-August to Sept. 2, almost 58 tons were sent for reuse at Uniglass and Koub/Golden Glass in Tripoli. Abichaker said he hoped, with funding, to bring the total to 250 tons.
At the volunteer hub dubbed the Base Camp in Beirut’s hard-hit Mar Mikhael district, young men and women kitted out with sturdy shoes, masks and heavy gloves sort the glass, pulling bits of detritus out of the piled shards under a scorching sun.
Anthony Abdel Karim, who months before the blast had launched an upcycling glass project called Annine Fadye or “Empty Bottle” in Arabic, coordinates the operations.
We decided that at least part of the shattered glass ... our local industries should benefit from as a raw material.
Ziad Abichaker
CEO of Cedar Environmental