If you lived in Lebanon during the summer of 2015, you remember the smell before you remember the headlines. The waste crisis seeped into every street, every balcony, every bus ride. Mountains of uncollected trash became part of the landscape, and for a moment it felt as if the country itself had stopped breathing.
Nearly a decade later, that memory hasn’t faded, not because it’s distant, but because it never fully left. Today, we still step out for a walk and brace ourselves for the familiar sting of a garbage pile baking under the sun. We navigate around dumped furniture abandoned on sidewalks, pass corners where torn bags reveal forgotten clothes, and catch the lingering scent of waste that has become an unwelcome companion in many public spaces.
Lebanon’s waste crisis did not begin in 2015, and it certainly didn’t end there. But that moment marked a turning point, a reminder of how fragile our systems are and how urgently we need solutions that last.
The waste problem goes back way before 2015, and as a response to it, arcenciel started working towards sustainable practices in Lebanon that led to the creation of its Environmental Program.
In a country where waste is burned in the open, dumped along riverbeds, or left to rot in overflowing landfills, arcenciel has spent decades building powerful systems that protect both people and the environment through four units within its Environment Sector: DERE (Solid Waste Recycling), DEHO (Hospital Waste Treatment), the Social Boutique (circular economy initiative for clothing waste), and the Brocante (circular economy initiative for unwanted furniture and household items).
1. DEHO: Saving Lives During the Pandemic
arcenciel operates specialized facilities that collect, sterilize, and shred infectious medical waste, converting it into non-hazardous material suitable for regular disposal.
When we looked at the timeline of medical waste in Lebanon, one pattern immediately stood out. Between 2019 and 2021, the curve shoots upward, a sharp peak that mirrors the most intense years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In those years, DEHO handled record quantities of medical waste, reaching nearly 4,700 tons. Behind those numbers were packed hospital corridors, nonstop testing, and the global scramble for disposable protective equipment.
But the story shifts after 2022. As the pandemic slowly loosened its grip, medical waste volumes began to fall. By 2025, at least up to mid-October, the total had dropped to around 2,795 tons, signaling a gradual return to more typical levels.
The client landscape tells its own part of the story. Unsurprisingly, hospitals dominate, making up the largest share of medical waste generators, around 1,400 institutions. They’re followed by healthcare centers, labs, and clinics. Yet one detail we hadn’t expected emerged quietly in the data: veterinary practices. There are only 28 of them in the system, but they still appear as steady contributors to DEHO’s operations, a reminder that “medical waste” extends beyond human healthcare.
On the map, another pattern comes into focus. The brightest cluster sits right where you’d expect, Beirut, home to the country’s biggest hospitals and medical centers. Mount Lebanon forms a secondary ring, and beyond that, smaller dots scatter into Bekaa and the North. The geography of medical waste, it turns out, closely follows the geography of healthcare itself.
2. DERE: The Decline of Solid Waste Recycling
For many people, arcenciel’s Rolling Caps project is the first thing that comes to mind when they think about recycling, a simple act of collecting plastic caps that grew into a nationwide habit. But as we dug deeper into the DERE dataset, it became clear that the story of solid waste management goes far beyond bottle caps. It is, in fact, a story of quiet decline.
Between 2019 and mid-October 2025, the amount of solid waste managed by arcenciel fell by more than 85%, from 1,230 tons to just 174 tons. This isn’t a sudden dip; it’s a steady, multi-year decline that signals a deeper shift in how waste is being generated, sorted, and collected in Lebanon.
The drop becomes even clearer when looking at who’s producing this waste. Offices and residential buildings, once the core of the system, have significantly pulled back. Office clients shrank from 170 to 49, and residential buildings from 137 to 35. NGOs and individuals stayed relatively stable but remain small contributors, while educational institutions almost disappeared from the client base altogether. The trend points to a broader decline in organizational participation in recycling practices.
Spatially, most activity is concentrated in Mount Lebanon, with far less taking place in Beirut and very little in the Bekaa. This pattern mirrors our survey responses, suggesting similar geographic trends in both waste generation and public engagement.
For many, the Rolling Caps project remains the most memorable symbol of arcenciel’s recycling efforts, a simple initiative that caught national attention. Yet the data shows a more complex reality: solid waste management has been steadily shrinking, reminding us of the work needed to rekindle participation and rebuild trust in sustainable systems.
3. Social Boutique: Clothing Donations as a Social Lifeline
If DERE shows us how waste declines, the Social Boutique shows us how resources circulate. At its heart, the boutique is a simple but powerful idea: clothing donated by the public is sorted, repaired, and redistributed to families who need it most. What arrives as a bag of used clothes leaves as warmth and support.
From 2023 to 2025, the data reveals an interesting pattern. Even though 2025 only includes records up to mid-October, it already accounts for an unusually large share of the total clothing weight collected, suggesting early-year surges or improvements in how donations are handled. The Bouchrieh center stands out as the busiest hub, serving more than 12,000 people in 2023 and over 6,000 in 2024, with Zahlé and Galaxy following behind at smaller but meaningful scales.
One spike in the data is impossible to ignore: in late 2024, over 22,000 clothing items were tagged as war-related. These represent urgent distributions during October to December, when thousands of families were displaced and in need of immediate support.
But the Social Boutique’s impact isn’t just in the items it collects it’s in the people who make it all work. The team is mostly women, many from vulnerable backgrounds, including women with disabilities. Through steady employment and community support, they turn donated clothes into a lifeline for others, becoming key players in Lebanon’s circular economy.
4. Brocante: Furniture Reuse and the Circular Economy in Action
The Social Boutique tells the story of clothing, then the Brocante tells the story of furniture, the heavy, bulky pieces that often end up on sidewalks or abandoned during crises. Instead of becoming waste, these items enter arcenciel’s circular economy: collected from homes, repaired when needed, and resold at accessible prices to support the organization’s sustainability. Furniture often ends up on sidewalks, in empty lots, or in landfills, but the Brocante transforms these discarded items into opportunities. The collection trip data reveals patterns shaped by Lebanon’s crises. Trips declined during 2024, reflecting war-related mobility challenges, but rose again in 2025.
The data shows a mixed pattern in collection activity. Between 2022 and 2025, the number of collection trips, each representing at least one donated furniture or household item, fluctuated. Trips dropped from 679 in 2022 to 554 in 2024, before rising again to 608 in 2025 (with data only until October). The dip in 2024 isn’t random; it mirrors the disruptions of the 2024 war, when mobility, relocations, and donation patterns were heavily affected.
Sales, however, tell a clearer story. From 2020 to 2025, total revenue from Brocante items steadily fell from 244,426 USD to 79,498 USD. But this decline isn’t about fewer donations or lower demand. As the Environment Sector lead explained, it reflects an operational gap: the closure of the Galaxy Mall showroom in December 2024 and the delayed opening of the new Zalka Eco Hub in April 2025. With no physical space to sell items for several months, early 2025 shows a sharp drop in revenue, a logistical pause rather than a weakening of the model.
Despite these fluctuations, the Brocante remains a cornerstone of arcenciel’s approach to circularity, turning what might have become trash into both environmental and financial value.
Recycling at home and giving your recyclables to arcenciel
Donating clothes or furniture
🗺️ Collection points are available at all 10 arcenciel centers across Lebanon.
📧 For large quantities of recyclables, furniture, or clothing, contact: info@arcenciel.org
What about the future?
If the present reflects the weight of Lebanon’s challenges, the future reflects the power of what its communities can achieve when circularity, inclusion, and sustainability are not just ideas, but everyday practice. And this future is not theoretical, it is already beginning, one recycled bottle, one hospital partnership, one donated chair, and one empowered individual at a time.
When I think back to my early years in school, the lessons were simple. A chalkboard, a few markers, and a teacher doing their best while the electricity flickered in the background. A class would finally settle, a discussion would gain momentum, and the lights would cut without warning. We’d sit in the dim room, the fans would suddenly stop, and we were left waiting for the power to return, trying to remember where the lesson left off. Those interruptions were part of the experience, so common that no one questioned them.
As the years passed, classrooms began to modernize. Projectors arrived. Computer labs appeared. And eventually, interactive dashboards took their place at the front of the room. These dashboards became a source of excitement; they felt like a step into the future. Teachers redesigned lessons around them, students leaned closer to the glowing screens, and the whole school seemed to believe that this was the solution we had been waiting for. Finally, technology was here to fix what had long been broken.
But the interruptions stayed. The dashboards froze mid lesson, the Wi-Fi collapsed at the wrong moment, the electricity cut just as the new tools were beginning to make a difference.
The technology advanced, yet the experience stayed strangely familiar. The same pause, the same silence, the same loss of rhythm. It became clear that the issue had never truly been the tools themselves, it was whether they could stay on long enough to be useful.
That memory followed me when analyzing towns across Lebanon, I saw the same pattern we lived in classrooms: places that seemed equipped still struggled, while others managed with far less. At first glance, the landscape looked scattered and contradictory.
But something shifted when the focus switched from the presence of infrastructure to its stability. Suddenly, the picture made sense. Towns where electricity stayed on, even modestly longer, began to show noticeably stronger educational outcomes. Where the internet didn’t collapse, lessons actually reached their end. Where systems held together, learning had the space to take shape.
We can see how dramatically education improves the moment infrastructure stops stalling. The rise is immediate. The difference is visible. And beyond a certain point, adding more tools doesn’t change much, what matters is that the existing ones work reliably.
It reminded me of all the classrooms I’d sat in. From chalkboards to dashboards to online lessons, the tools changed, yet the experiences rose and fell with the stability behind them. Two schools could have the same equipment and the same ambitions, but if one lost power twice a day, the outcomes were never going to match.
That is why the solution is not about installing more dashboards or building more facilities. It’s about making sure the systems already in place function consistently. When electricity stays on and connections hold, students engage differently, teachers teach differently, and the promise of modern tools finally becomes real.
Education doesn’t move forward just because technology arrives. It moves forward when technology stays alive long enough to matter.
And when I look back at the classrooms I grew up in, and the classrooms students sit in today, the story feels unchanged in one important way: progress has never been limited by how much we have, it has been limited by how reliably it works.
Companies often evaluate performance by looking only at sales, assuming that high revenue automatically reflects strong results. However, sales can be misleading. Some categories generate impressive revenue but end up losing money, while others quietly drive the majority of profit. Relying on sales alone can lead to poor investments and inaccurate conclusions about category performance.
The dataset shows several categories, especially in Furniture, generating strong sales but very low or even negative profit. At the same time, categories with lower sales sometimes produce healthier margins.
Analyzing sales and profit together helps reveal which categories actually create value and which ones drain resources.
The data shows that Office Supplies and Technology consistently generate positive profit, even when their sales levels vary. Furniture categories, however, show a mismatch: moderate demand but weak profitability, suggesting high costs or inefficient pricing strategies.
Comparing sales and profit makes it clear which categories support overall performance and which ones weaken it. Categories with strong sales and strong profit promote growth, while those with high sales but low profit reduce financial strength.
High revenue does not guarantee strong performance. The business should reassess low-profit categories, especially in Furniture, and prioritize categories that consistently generate positive profit. Focusing on profitability rather than sales volume leads to more informed and sustainable decisions.
When COVID-19 began spreading across Lebanon, not all towns were affected in the same way. Some communities were already carrying another burden long before the pandemic arrived: chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular conditions. This raised an important question: did towns with more chronic illness also experience higher COVID-19 case numbers?
To explore this, I visualized the relationship between chronic disease presence and the total number of COVID-19 cases across Lebanese towns. The visualization below compares towns with and without chronic disease burdens, making it easy to see which communities were hit hardest as shown below.
As the bars reveal, the towns shown in blue — those with chronic disease — consistently appear at the top of the ranking. Choueifat, Ghobeiri, Hadath-Sbeineh, Haret Hreik, and Tahouitat El Ghadir stand out with significantly higher COVID-19 case counts. By contrast, towns represented in grey, with no chronic disease reported, tend to have lower case numbers and cluster toward the bottom of the list.
This pattern suggests that the pandemic amplified pre-existing vulnerabilities. Towns where chronic diseases were more common may also have had denser populations, older residents, more complex healthcare needs, or other structural factors that made containment more difficult. Although this visualization does not prove direct causation, the correlation is clear and consistent.
Understanding these disparities is crucial for future public-health planning. Communities carrying a dual burden — high chronic disease prevalence and elevated infection rates — would benefit from targeted support, improved access to care, and early intervention strategies. The visualization serves as a reminder that pandemics do not impact all towns equally, and that underlying health conditions can shape the trajectory of a crisis in powerful ways.
How often do you crash into potholes and hope that your car is still fine ?
We encounter them daily—the potholes, the fissures, the decliningcondition of Lebanon’s streets. It’s a commongrievance. However, is the weight of this crisis distributedfairlythroughout the nation? The anecdotal evidence indicates it’s poor everywhere, but the data uncovers a more concerning and systemic narrative of inequality
Problem Highlight
We hear about bad roads and potholes everywhere in Lebanon
One big problem is the condition of the roads that is immensely different in districts compared to others .
Is the crisis the same everywhere? The data was showing the truth
The Evidence
To transcend anecdotes, we illustrated the informationregarding road conditions throughout Lebanon. The outcomepresents a distinct and disquietingimage.
This visualrepresentationserves as a diagnostic instrument. Every point indicates the road status in a particularregion, and its locationnarrates a tale:
The moreto the right a point is, the poorer the road conditions.
The figurelinked to the point preciselymeasures “how severe” the circumstancesare
Revelation: The Story is in the Distance
The most startling realization is not only that some points are on the right, but also how far apart they are.
The chart’s arrows draw attention to the stark contrast between the areas with the best and worst maintenance. The disparity in infrastructure upkeep and care that exists in the real world is directly reflected in this physical distance on the chart. We may infer a history of unequal budget allocation and focus from the data, which shows an uneven distribution of the problem.
Clearly , Akkar is the center of this issue
Its data points are pushed as far to the right as possible, indicating that this area is most affected by the collapse of the infrastructure.
Why This Matters: The Human Impact
How does it affect citizens’ daily life ?
More traffic jams
More accidents
Increased danger in general
More floods
Inaccessible areas
Car damage
This goesbeyond uncomfortable car journeys. The deterioration of road infrastructure leadstosignificant human and economic impacts:
Economic Expense:Increased traffic congestion and notablevehicle damage raise the expenses of living and business.
Public Safety: Bad roads resultinahighernumberof accidents and greaterrisk for everyindividual.
Social Isolation: Remoteregionsmay become disconnected from necessary services, jobopportunities, and social networks
The WayAhead: A Solution InformedbyData
So, whatstepsshould we takenext? This informationoffers a straightforward,practicalframework for resolvingtheissue.
The approach is simple:
Focuson Action: Begin maintenance and budget distribution in the sectors where the dots are furthest to the right—the areas in the most urgent condition.
StagedRecovery:Slowlyallocate resources to the moreintactregions,developing a systematic,stagedstrategyaccording to levelofdamage
The goal is to transform data into a tool for decision-making. We now have the evidence to move from nearly no clue on what was happening to a strategic, plan for Lebanon’s road network.
Samer is a 58-year-old shop owner in Baabda. He has diabetes and hypertension, and like many others living with chronic conditions, he spent the early months of the pandemic in quiet fear. He followed every guideline, avoided unnecessary outings, and even closed his shop early just to stay safe.
As I began working with data on chronic disease prevalence across Lebanon, I kept thinking about people like Samer; individuals whose health risks existed long before COVID-19 arrived. It made me wonder: Do districts with more people like Samer also end up reporting more COVID-19 cases?
At first, the logic seemed simple: more chronic conditions should mean higher vulnerability, and higher vulnerability should mean more cases.
But once I visualized the data, the story turned out to be more complicated than that.
When we look at Baabda, Samer’s home district, the pattern is exactly what we expect. Baabda and Matn have a high chronic disease prevalence which explains why they recorded the highest number of COVID-19 cases. These districts appear in red in the visualization because they represent the expected relationship: high chronic disease prevalence accompanied by high COVID-19 case counts.
Most other districts show the same downward pattern: fewer chronic illnesses tend to come with fewer reported infections. It’s the straightforward story we anticipate.
Until one district breaks it.
While exploring the data, Akkar immediately stood out. Unlike Baabda or Matn, Akkar shows relatively low COVID-19 case numbers despite having a high prevalence of chronic diseases. At first glance, this shouldn’t happen. But Akkar tells a different health story.
Akkar is less dense, has fewer specialized medical centers, and mobility patterns differ. But an important social factor also played a role: many residents initially believed COVID-19 was “just a flu”, something exaggerated, not dangerous. Because of that, people were far less likely to get tested, especially when symptoms were mild or unclear.
So, the low case numbers may not reflect low infections, they reflect low detection. Akkar shows us that vulnerability isn’t only biological or medical. Sometimes it’s cultural, structural, or tied to trust in the health system itself.
That was the moment when the visualization stopped being merely a chart and became a real narrative.
People like Samer live in districts where both chronic disease and COVID-19 risks were high and highly visible. But in Akkar, people with the same medical vulnerabilities faced a quieter, more hidden risk, one that doesn’t always show up in official numbers but still shapes their health outcomes.
This is the heart of the story: patterns tell us what usually happens, but exceptions reveal what we might be missing.
Understanding these mismatches matters. High-case, high-risk districts like Baabda and Matn may need more hospital capacity and emergency planning. High-risk, low-case districts like Akkar may need earlier outreach, awareness campaigns, and accessible screening, especially in communities that may initially resist testing.
If we focus only on case counts, we risk overlooking communities that need protection long before outbreaks become visible.
When I think back to Samer, closing his shop early every night, hoping to stay healthy, I’m reminded that data becomes meaningful when it reflects real people. In public health, the story doesn’t live only in the trend. It lives in the exception. Because that’s where we discover the next challenge before it appears.
