For the past three months, Ahmad Mehdi has been living in half a home. In October, an Israeli airstrike on the building next to his in a neighborhood south of Beirut blew out most of the kitchen and living room of his fifth-floor apartment.
When he looks at what remains of the building next door, he is overwhelmed by the scale of destruction. “Eleven floors worth of rubble have collapsed into two,” he said. “All you see are rocks and dirt and steel and bits of iron.”
Like many Lebanese whose homes and businesses suffered damage during more than a year of war between Israel and Hezbollah, Mr. Mehdi, 20, and his family are eager to start repairs, but they cannot do much until the rubble is cleared. “That is our biggest problem: Where do we put the debris?” he said.
As Lebanon starts the slow process of rebuilding after a tenuous cease-fire between Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, and Israel, it is struggling to figure out how to clean up the vast amounts of rubble left scattered around Beirut, the capital. A report from the National Council for Scientific Research in Lebanon said a preliminary estimate of damages showed that nearly 3,000 buildings in the Dahiya area south of the city had been destroyed, severely damaged or extensively damaged.
More than 3,700 people in Lebanon were killed during the war, which started when Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based militia, began firing on Israeli positions after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel of Oct. 7, 2023. The conflict displaced about 1.3 million people in Lebanon, wiped out an estimated billions of dollars from the economy and devastated large portions of southern Lebanon near the border with Israel, as well as the densely populated areas south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway.
Tamara Elzein, an author of the report, said that initial assessments showed that Israeli attacks on buildings, houses, factories, roads and other infrastructure across the country had created an estimated 350 million cubic feet of rubble. Substantial reconstruction cannot begin until all of that is cleaned up. In Gaza, where Israel has been fighting a war to root out Hamas militants, nearly 60 percent of buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the besieged enclave. Hezbollah rocket attacks in Israel have also destroyed or damaged homes in border communities and caused wildfires in farmland.
Issam Srour, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the American University of Beirut, said that landfills in Lebanon were already struggling to handle often hazardous construction waste. Much of it, he said, is dumped into the environment.
In 2006, after the last war between Hezbollah and Israel, debris from heavily bombed areas south of Beirut, which included unexploded ordnance, asbestos, synthetic furnishings, shattered electronic devices and organic waste, was dumped along the shoreline near the airport, environmental experts say.
That evolved into a permanent landfill, without adequate barriers to protect the marine environment from toxic chemicals leaching from the debris, they say. The area, known as Costa Brava, has become synonymous with environmental disaster in Lebanon.
The effect of the latest conflict, Mr. Srour said, could be far greater and more damaging.
Over the past decade, Lebanon has seen an exponential rise in the use of solar panels and battery storage to compensate for the country’s faltering electrical grid. Improper disposal of panels and batteries can put lead, mercury and other hazardous elements into the environment.
“The level of hazards in the debris we have now is much worse than what we saw in 2006,” Mr. Srour said. “We cannot afford to neglect the environmental footprint of the debris like we did the last time. The reason is simple: We won’t see the consequences of poor management now, but we will certainly see them later.”
The National Council for Scientific Research estimates that in just one area, the Dahiya, nearly 4,000 solar panels were badly damaged in the conflict. Pulverized into toxic dust and leaching dangerous chemicals, they could pose a serious risk if they are not adequately treated before disposal.
When Mr. Mehdi, an engineering student at the American University of Beirut, looks over the rubble of his neighborhood from what remains of his balcony, he understands the hazards lurking beneath the rebar and jagged concrete. But he also sees the potential.
Cleaned up and sorted, he said, the rubble could be recycled into the building blocks of badly needed new infrastructure instead of starting from scratch by mining sand and stone to produce concrete.
“I’m looking at the positive side of all this,” he said. “The war was a tragedy for Lebanon. But there are a lot of opportunities in all this rubble.”
Yet given the urgent need to rebuild and the time it would take to sort through the debris to find reusable materials, he fears that it will be dumped instead. Government officials say they are considering expanding dump sites like Costa Brava to accommodate the debris.
“We could do it in a way that is better for Lebanon and the environment,” Mr. Mehdi said. “But it will take longer and probably cost more. I fear the government will choose the easier route.”
Terre Liban, an environmental advocacy group, is campaigning to push the government to find more sustainable options, as are fishers who earn their livelihood from waters off the coast.
The creation of the Costa Brava landfill after the previous war was a disaster for local fishers, said Idriss Atriss, the head of an association of fishers that operates along the coast south of Beirut. Marine life was decimated and only started recovering in the past few years, he said.
In December, Lebanon’s caretaker government set aside $25 million for damage assessment, demolition and debris removal. The government was vague on the details, even as it offered assurances that environmental concerns would be considered.
The environment minister, Nasser Yassin, said that dealing with rubble from areas around Beirut was more difficult because of its large volume, the potential for hazardous materials and a lack of space within reasonable trucking distance
Ali Hamieh, Lebanon’s minister for public works and transportation, said the only solution was to dump debris from the Beirut area next to Costa Brava.
That would further threaten the area’s already endangered wildlife, Mr. Atriss said. “It’s where the turtles spawn. We won’t accept that.”
Terre Liban’s president, Paul Abi Rached, agreed, saying that heavy metals and chemicals washing off the debris would go straight into the Mediterranean, poisoning not only Lebanese waters, but also those of Europe, given the path of ocean currents. “It’s not logical to use the Mediterranean as a garbage dump,” he said.
He added that discarding untreated waste on land was not a solution either. Rain can wash contaminants into Lebanon’s rivers and lakes, and eventually the Mediterranean.
Recycling could help reduce Lebanon’s carbon emissions. According to calculations by Charlie Lawrie, an energy and environment specialist at the Lebanese Badil policy institute, rebuilding what was lost during the war could generate approximately 14.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from cement manufacturing.
If the rubble is recycled into gravel and building blocks, it will help reduce those emissions while saving on the cost of energy-intensive concrete production, said Najat Aoun Saliba, a Lebanese member of Parliament who serves on the environment committee. “We need to think differently about rubble,” she said. “It is not waste. It is a resource.”
Dayana Iwaza contributed reporting.