The Khalife family’s glassblowing workshop in the southern coastal village of Sarafand, Lebanon, has been given a new lease of life thanks to an initiative for recycling waste glass normally destined for landfills. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
BEIRUT, Apr 5 2015 (IPS)

In the Khalife workshop, in the southern coastal village of Sarafand, four men stand beside an oven, fixed in concentration despite the oppressive temperature. Blowing through a long tube, one of the group carefully shapes white-hot melted glass into a small ball, while two others coax it into the form of a beer glass. The fourth, the veteran of the group, cuts off the top of the glass, creating an opening from which beer will one day flow.

Working in shifts, the members of Lebanon’s last dynasty of glass blowers work tirelessly day and night to ensure customers receive their products on time. Currently they are in the process of producing 133,000 artisan glasses commissioned by Almaza, a subsidiary of Heineken, and the most popular beer in Lebanon.

When Ziad Abichaker phoned the Khalife family two years ago, they could not even dream of an order of such a size. The workshop’s oven had been idle for five months and the business was about to close.The Khalife family’s glassblowing workshop had relied heavily on Lebanon’s tourism industry to generate profits, but that was before the number of tourists started drying up due to fallout from the conflict in Syria.

As manager Hussein Khalife explains, the workshop had relied heavily on Lebanon’s tourism industry to generate profits, but that was before the number of tourists started drying up due to fallout from the conflict in Syria.

However, Abichaker, a multi-disciplinary engineer and owner of Cedar Environmental, an environmental and industrial engineering organisation that aims to build recycling plants to produce organically certified fertilisers, saw an opportunity to revive the family business.

During the July 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the country’s only green glass manufacturing plant, located in the Bekaa valley. Lacking investors to pump in the about 40 million dollars necessary to rebuild it, the plant has remained in a state of disrepair and as a consequence, local beer and wine companies have become reliant on importing their bottles.

Abichaker – who operates ten municipal waste management plants through Cedar Environmental which had previously supplied the Bekaa glass plant – began stockpiling glass rather than see it end up in Lebanon’s landfills.

“Around 71 million bottles end up in the landfills per year,” says Abichaker. “All the green glass that we sorted from the waste management plants had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to throw it away, so we started stocking the bottles while thinking of a solution”.  By the time Abichaker started working with Hussein Khalife in 2013, he had already stocked around 60 tonnes of beer bottles.

Together, they began working on a solution that would give new life to all the stocked glass, and also save the Khalife business. After putting together a business plan, they decided to create a number of new glass designs with a chic and modern finish as well as create more niche sales points.

Besides glasses, the business plan also called for the production of cups, vases and lamps whose bases are made from recycled wood.

Known as the Green Glass Recycling Initiative – Lebanon (GGRIL), Abichaker explains that for Cedar Environmental, the project is a non-profit initiative. “Eighty percent of the revenues go back to the Khalife glass blowers and the remaining 20 percent to the retailer. What we gain as Cedar Environmental is that they take all the green glass from our plants. So we still maintain zero waste status in our recycling plants.”

Today, the initiative’s products are on sale in ten different locations in Beirut, including restaurants, alternative galleries and gift shops, and recently Abichaker and Khalife also started selling them online.

Hussein Khalife shows his satisfaction at being able to preserve the family’s artisan business, the legacy of generations of glass blowers. “When Ziad [Abichaker] proposed creating new designs, we decided to go ahead,” says Khalife. “It was a risk for us but it was worth it.”

After closing 2014 over 42,000 dollars up on sales, the Almaza order – GGRI’s biggest to date – came through and Abichaker is adamant that it will not be a one-off.

The most recent step for the fledgling initiative was to raise funds to purchase a truck to pick up used glasses from bins they plan to place around some of Beirut’s more popular nightspots. A crowd-funding project last year raised 30,000 dollars.

“I think that by the end of 2015 we will have diverted one million beer bottles from landfills,” estimates Abichaker, but while this is a considerable amount, it constitutes only a tiny portion of the 1.57 million of tonnes of solid waste that Lebanon produces per year, according to a 2010 report from SWEEP-Net, a regional solid waste exchange of information and expertise network in Mashreq and Maghreb countries.

Currently, most of Lebanon’s green glass ends up in the landfill of the coastal municipality of Naameh, a town just south of Beirut. Created in 1997, the landfill was only meant to be active for six years due to environmental concerns. However, 18 years later it is still in use. Once again scheduled to close in January this year, the Lebanese government approved an extensions of the deadline for three months due to the absence of an alternative site.

“It is a catastrophe there, it is overfull”, says Paul Abi Rached, president of the Lebanese environmental non-governmental organisation TERRE Liban. “You have big impacts on air pollution, climate change. In particular,  leachate – the liquid that drains from a landfill – is being thrown into the Mediterranean Sea.”

Abi Rached criticises the government for a perceived lack of commitment to developing recycling policies. The government, notes Abi Rached, award contracts to private sector waste management companies without prioritising environmentally friendly methods.

In addition to the shortcomings of governmental waste-management programs, Abichaker argues that it is absolutely necessary to raise the general public’s awareness of the importance of protecting the environment.

“Now people are becoming more aware that they should safeguard their environment because they have realised that it affects their own health, their own habitat,” he says, “but we still have a long way to go.”

Edited by Phil Harris

Hezbollah clashes with Syrian rebels on the outskirts of Ersal seem to be widening the divide between residents of the Eastern Bekaa town – increasingly dominated by Syrian rebels, including the radical Nusra Front – and other regions as well as the Lebanese state. 

At the bottom of the rugged Syrian Qalamoun mountain chain lies the predominantly Sunni town of Ersal. The region is known historically as a smuggling route between Syria and Lebanon.

Since the beginning of the Syria revolution, politics have pushed its people away from their Bekaa neighbours, who mostly belong to the Shiite community. Ersal largely sympathises with the Sunni-led uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad, while Bekaa Shiites support the Lebanese Hezbollah, which is currently fighting alongside Syrian regime forces.“Clashes between Hezbollah and Syrian rebels have aggravated tensions between local residents and their neighbours, and every incident is causing a backlash on the village [Ersal]” – deputy mayor of Ersal, Ahmad Fleety

Despite the fall of Qalamoun to Hezbollah and Assad regime troops in March, fighting has resumed in the Syrian region as well as the barren valley and rocky tops of Ersal in Lebanon, where rebels are also present.

“The clout of Syrian insurgents over the town has become an unavoidable reality,” says a Lebanese army officer speaking on condition of anonymity.

This week, seven members of Hezbollah died and 31 others were wounded, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The fighters were killed in an ambush in the hills above Ersal. The rugged area is also used a rocket launch pad by rebels who frequently target Hezbollah villages in Bekaa.

“The Syrian-Lebanese border there is the soft belly of Hezbollah’s stronghold as it overlooks the Bekaa and more importantly the city of Baalbeck, which is the birthplace of the militant organisation,” says Professor Hilal Khashan from the American University of Beirut.

“Rebels, including the Nusra Front, are using Ersal to launch attacks on Hezbollah, which is self-compelled to retake the region, at a very high cost,” he adds.

The military source underlines that an estimated 6,000 Syrian fighters have found refuge in Ersal. Hundreds of opposition militants are believed to be hiding in the hills and caves above the town. Dirt tracks connecting Ersal to the Bekaa mountain tops are also used by residents to ferry aid, gasoline and supplies to insurgents.

Deputy mayor Ahmad Fleety admits that Ersal is paying a high price for backing the Syrian revolution.  “Clashes between Hezbollah and Syrian rebels have aggravated tensions between local residents and their neighbours, and every incident is causing a backlash on the village,” he says.

The official points out that an Ersal resident, Khaled Hujairi, was wounded in nearby Laboueh after the funeral of one of the Hezbollah fighters who died in the recent battles.

However, the divide separating Ersal residents from those residing in surrounding villages dates back to the beginning of the uprising and a spate of tit-for-tat kidnappings between Sunnis and Shiites.

Relations between the two communities took a turn for the worse after four Shiites were killed in June last year near Ersal.  The trend was only exacerbated when the town remained under siege for several weeks early this year, after the village became a transit point from Syria into Lebanon for booby-trapped cars targeting Shiite areas.

Ersal’s grim reality is only compounded by the town’s isolation. A small asphalt road connects it to the rest of Bekaa, and from there onward to the capital Beirut. Syrian planes frequently fly over, firing missiles into the village and the mountain tops above it. An attack this week led to the injury of seven Ersal residents.

These repetitive incidents rarely draw any complaints from Lebanon.

“Ersal is an outlying territory neglected by the government, which can explain the rise of extremism there. If Ersal residents felt they belonged to the Lebanese state, they would not be so supportive of Syrian rebels,” points out Khashan.

In addition, relations with the state have been strained by a series of incidents, the most recent leading last year to clashes between an army patrol and local residents, claiming the lives of two Lebanese armed forces members as well as one suspect who was being pursued.

The presence of over 120,000 Syrian refugees – which exceeds the local population threefold – is further straining relations with the state and other villages. “Ersal people have chosen to support the Syrian revolution, they won’t back down,” says local activist Abu Mohamad Oueid.

The deepening feeling of distrust between old neighbours now turned foes seems to be here to stay, and the fates of Ersal residents to be intertwined with that of Syrian rebels.

With jihadists leading a Sunni uprising against Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government, the conflicts in Syria and Iraq are beginning to reverberate across the region, raising fears of contagion in divided Lebanon where a suicide bombing took place on Friday after a period of calm.

The advance on Baghdad of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is threatening a fragile quiet in Lebanon. On Friday, an explosion rocked the mountainous Dahr al-Baydar crossing in the Bekaa region as a suicide bomber blew himself up near an Internal Security Forces checkpoint. The bombing took place shortly after the convoy of General Security Chief Abbas Ibrahim had passed.

Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that two people were killed and a number of others were wounded in the attack. “The danger resides in the dormant terrorist cells that exist across the country, we have uncovered several plots and security breaches in the last week alone,” said a Lebanese army officer speaking on condition of anonymity.“Weapons held both by Shiite Hezbollah and Palestinian factions are a source of constant threat for Lebanon, which is the scene of a permanent struggle” – Wehbe Katisha, retired Lebanese general and military expert

A document from Israel’s Mossad secret service, published by local newspaper An-Nahar on the day of explosion reported that Islamists with the Al Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Azzam Brigades planned to assassinate a senior Lebanese security official, possibly General Ibrahim.

The kick-off early this year of a security plan has allowed the arrest of several terrorists who were responsible for a string of bombings targeting Shiite regions, where populations support the Hezbollah militant group.  The organisation is currently heavily involved in Syria where some 5,000 Hezbollah fighters are believed to be spearheading operations alongside troops of President Bachar Assad, according to a source close to the party.

The Syrian uprising has been led largely by Syrian Sunnis waging war against a government headed by the Assad clan, which belongs to the Alawite community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

While Hezbollah’s control of borders areas in Syria has disrupted supply lines which allowed for the transfer of booby-trapped cars from Syria into Lebanon has damaged the capabilities of terror groups, it has not put a complete end to it, according to experts.

There are still illegal passageways for the transfer of ammunition or explosives, both in the Bekaa and North Lebanon areas,” said Wehbe Katisha, a retired Lebanese general and military expert.

Against this background, new reports are also pointing to possible attacks on Dahieh (Beirut’s southern suburbs and a bastion for Hezbollah), added Katisha. Early this week, members of Hezbollah and the Lebanese army boosted security measures around the area after news that a terrorist group might attack two hospitals in the region.

General Wehbe Katisha stressed that the state’s institution’s weakness combined with the proliferation of Sunni jihadist networks as well as Shiite militias are factors conducive to renewed sectarian violence. “Weapons held both by Shiite Hezbollah and Palestinian factions are a source of constant threat for Lebanon, which is the scene of a permanent struggle,” he pointed out.

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have played a major role in the string of bombings that took place last year and early this year.  One of the main networks dismantled by the Lebanese armed forces was headed by Palestinian commander Naim Abbas, a member of the Abdallah Azzam Brigades, an affiliate of the Syrian radical organisation, the Nusra Front.

The organisation has claimed the twin suicide bombing targeting last November of the Iranian Embassy in Beirut, staged by a Lebanese and a Palestinian national. “Reports are showing that Palestinian radical groups in refugee camps are getting restless and more active,” said the security source.  The situation in Lebanon’s main Palestinian camp Ain al-Hilweh is precarious amid reports of a growing influx of foreign extremist Sunni militants from Syria and other Lebanese areas.

This opinion is also shared by Katisha who added that Palestinian groups can be easily manipulated by foreign groups while some Syrian refugees in the Bekaa are willing to fight Hezbollah.

In an attempt to shield the country from the Iraqi violence, the Lebanese Army has carried out raids on Syrian refugee camps in Ersal, on Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria. The outskirts of Ersal are now home to a few thousands Syrian rebels who withdrew from Syrian border regions after they were reclaimed by Assad’s forces and Hezbollah. Early this month, three teens were briefly kidnapped and tortured, with local media reports linking the abduction to the Nusra Front.

“Al-Qaeda does not have an official presence in Lebanon but many individuals have adopted its discourse and are taking advantage of the rising Sunni-Shiite rivalry in Lebanon. The events in Iraq, with the surge of Sunnis against the divisive policies of (Shiite prime minister) Nouri Maliki, are finding a strong echo among the country’s marginalized Sunni. There is a feeling that in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, the struggle is the same for Sunnis who are repressed by Iranian proxy groups,” said Lebanese Salafi Sheikh Nabil Rahim.

The messages of al-Qaeda’s affiliates such as ISIS and the Nusra Front are becoming more appealing to Lebanese Sunnis who are angry at Hezbollah’s increasing military clout over Lebanon as well as its involvement in the war against the Sunni majority’s revolution in Syria.

Since 2005, and the killing of the country’s Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, a member of the Sunni community, followed by the toppling in 2011 of the government of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, Lebanese Sunnis are increasingly at odds with Hezbollah. Five members of the militant group are currently being tried in absentia for the killing of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

“The latest development in Iraq will certainly fuel sectarian tensions in the region as well as Lebanon. It is also increasing the popularity of ISIS among Sunnis in certain areas in Lebanon, something we are trying to fight,” explained Sheikh Rahim.

Only days after the surge of ISIS in Iraq, Lebanon has once again been drawn into the circle of regional violence, the gains of ISIS hundreds of kilometres away seemingly emboldening radical groups in the ‘Land of the Cedars’.