“Ras Beirut Btifroz" campaign is a Sorting at the Source campaign in Ras Beirut launched by the AUB Neighborhood Initiative in Aug 2018 in collaboration with the AUB Nature Conservation Center and Arcenciel as well as support from the Municipality of Beirut. The campaign aims to effectively start a network of buildings who will commit to sorting their recyclables.
This is a very ambitious project that has taken its time to be properly implemented, and we want to make it succeed in order to make a difference in our neighborhood.
We started with 25 buildings in 2018, reached 65 buildings in 2019 and in 2020, we reached 85 participating buildings with around 1200 households around Ras Beirut. We have organized training sessions with most of the participating buildings to give detailed information and tips on sorting at home. Also in 2020, we expanded the project to include commercial venues such as Café Younes. We also partnered with Development Inc., a startup in waste management and recycling solutions for both the commercial and public sectors in Lebanon, to collect glass for recycling from our building network.
Since the start of the project, we have collected by the end of 2020 a total of 59,478kg of paper and cardboard, plastic, tins, cans, and aluminum. The material sales for the first 18 months have amounted to 11,478 $. We have reached a great result and we aim to raise these numbers as we go forward, with your commitment and enthusiasm for Ras Beirut to set a recycling model for the rest of the city. The collection fees paid to Arcenciel by the buildings (16$ per collection per building) cover basically the cost of the collection itself while the secondary sorting at their Baabda facility, handling, packing, storing, sending to the recycling facilities, etc. gets covered by the material sales of the recyclables and any remaining profit usually goes to support Arcenciel’s community projects.
(Click on the images below for high resolution view)
To give this project a community feel, we have made an agreement with Arcenciel to give back 50% of the material sales of the recyclables collected within this project to be invested in public urban interventions in Ras Beirut. We already installed
the Public Tawleh by Ramzi Alieh (a permanent concrete backgammon table) on Jeanne d’Arc Street – Makhoul Intersection where you can play Tawleh 24/7 freely any time day or night; you just need to ask for the kit form the corner shop Le Sage and return it once done (photos below). We are now finalizing a permanent Ping pong table by District D made of recycled boards to encourage the community to reclaim our public space even our sidewalks. We will hopefully invite you to participate in public tournaments soon.
As for batteries and electronic waste that are not collected by Arcenciel, we have supported several collections free of charge from the participating buildings. We have electronic waste drop off points by EcoServe in the neighborhood. Cedar Environmental have also placed collection bins for glass on the sidewalks at the Abdel Aziz-Makdisi intersection and just below the AUB Medical Gate.
We are aiming to expand the project to as many buildings in our neighborhood especially those close to the ones already participating to optimize our routing and collection. We can do this! Apartment by apartment, and building by building we can make Ras Beirut a more environmentally friendly neighborhood.
