Sar Lezem Rassak Yefroz – This Makes No Sense

sarlezem

There’s this “Sar Lezem Rassa Yifroz” campaign on Facebook that caught my attention, not because of the catchy name but because I found it a bit weird.

The people behind that campaign believe that the closure of Naameh landfill will result in a crisis similar to what happened last year when waste piled up in Beirut, and want to manage that crisis by asking people to start sorting their waste material starting January 17th when Sukleen might stop collecting garbage due to the closure of the landfill.

The sorting is quite simple, in black bags you’re supposed to put food scraps along with paper to reduce the moisture and therefore delay the food fermentation, and in blue bags you put everything else (plastic, glass, metal, etc…).

Now what will happen as of January is that there will be around 100 trucks which will roam the streets of Beirut and Mount Lebanon to collect the blue bags ONLY (the ones containing recyclable material and can be sold) and leave the black ones on the street. So basically what irritates people the most and makes this crisis a crisis, that is the bad smell of fermented food scraps, will remain there! So I don’t really see how will this campaign manage the crisis other than by reducing the piles a bit and making use of the recyclable stuff (for their own benefits?).

Furthermore, they seem pretty confident that the campaign will reach a large number of people as they prepared a hundred trucks to roam the streets, but their facebook page seemed to have have no more than 480 likes at the time of publishing this post, so they will most probably be surprised when they notice the blue bags they targeted were full of all kind of waste and not just recyclable materials (don’t say I didn’t warn you guys!).

Not to mention that one of the campaign managers is also accused of copying the slogan from an Arabnet competition last year

The whole thing really doesn’t make a lot of sense now eh..?

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3 Responses to Sar Lezem Rassak Yefroz – This Makes No Sense

  1. Amadeus January 16, 2015 at 10:15 am #

    Spot on.

  2. Habib Battah (@habib_b) January 20, 2015 at 12:20 pm #

    So we shouldn’t support a recycling campaign in our garbage-infested country because it doesn’t have enough Facebook likes? Because it will help support poor Syrians that will sell our garbage for pennies? Because the phrase “lets start sorting” is copyrighted by some college students? Because it won’t solve a decades-old problem over night?

    Rami, I enjoy your posts and I think you are absolutely right to ask questions. But I also think we have a responsibility to start contributing to solving our country’s problems and what better place to start then garbage? If the problem is publicity, wouldn’t the solution be to promote this initiative rather that shoot it down?

    • Rami January 21, 2015 at 12:04 pm #

      The issue is not about facebook likes and popularity, I’m criticizing this campaign mainly because the idea behind it didn’t sound very applicable to me.

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