Glass from painful blast now objects of beauty
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 August port explosion ripped through countless glass doors and windows when it laid waste to whole Beirut neighbourhoods, killing at least 190 people and wounding thousands more.
Volunteers 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.
Hammoud said between 20 and 22 ton of glass had been brought to the factory.
Nearby, three men produced jars stamped out of a mold, while another two handled the more delicate process of blowing and forming the 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, teamed up with civil-society organisations 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 said.
According to him, more than 5 000 tons of glass was shattered by the explosion.
From mid-August, almost 58 ton were sent for reuse.
Abichaker said he hoped, with funding, to bring the total to 250 tons. – AFP