Following the waste management crisis gripping Lebanon since July 2015 and the permanent closure of Naameh landfill in May 2016, Lebanese municipalities were left to confront the crisis on their own without any prior experience in the matter. Some municipalities resorted to private contractors in order to collect and transport their generated waste, mainly to the Hbaline waste dump in Jbeil, while others created open dumps and burned their waste in the open. A few municipalities initiated sorting at source campaigns and/or started collecting recyclables. Shweir and Ain El Sindiyaneh, a municipality in northern Metn, to get rid of its municipal waste, imported a small scale/1st generation incinerator without any pollution control system and without undertaking an environmental impact assessment (EIA) study as per national legislation requirements. The incinerator was first placed on a land classified as “green zone” and cut a number of old trees to prepare the land for the incinerator. The first location was close to residential buildings and an agro food industry for the production of dairy products. The incinerator was met with resistance from residents in Shweir and neighboring villages and from a number of land owners. A local grassroots movement sprang up, endeavoring to raise awareness on the dangers of incineration and seeking to unite efforts and actions to remove the incinerator from Shweir. Following complaints and lawsuits, the Ministry of Environment issued in November 2015 a ministerial decision to cease any types of work at the incinerator's site pending an EIA submission. Under the pressure of local grassroots activists, the incinerator was removed from the first location and placed on the land of the public school of Shweir which is owned by the Ministry of Education. While waiting for the approval of the EIA, the municipality of Shweir continued working on expanding the incineration facility by adding a sorting belt and a shallow water pool and introduced some locally made pollution control devices. During the scoping phase of the EIA, a public hearing meeting was held at the village and all attendees expressed their refusal and concerns about the placement of the incinerator in the village and its related environmental and health effects. A petition was signed by 300 residents from Shweir and neighboring villages against the incinerator and was submitted to the Ministry of Environment. During the recurrent waste crisis, the municipality has sporadically operated the incinerator without a license and the Ministry of Environment issued several requests to the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities and to the Governor to stop it; however, these were not executed. Presently, the incinerator is not working. The EIA was submitted to the Ministry of Environment. The EIA was not approved and was returned to the consultant to revise it and respond to the Ministry’s enquiries and concerns.

The incinerator of Shweir and Ain El Sindiyaneh was supposed to treat the municipal waste generated at the village estimated at around 5 to 7 tons per day.

According to Raja Noujaim, from the Coalition Against Incineration, incineration is not a solution for Lebanon for several reasons. Firstly is the carcinogenic micro-particles, which are not suitable to be near population centers. Further, he points out that Lebanon’s waste is currently unsuitable for incineration, because it is not sorted at collection. “The main problem comes in the burning process, with mixtures of organic and non-organic petroleum products and organic products. The waste is 55 percent organic and 75 percent of this is water." This makes it difficult to burn [1].