THE first time I encountered Lebanon's garbage was in the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
It was at the secluded bay of the Oasis Hotel,where all was in keeping with paradise save for the bits of pale blue,pink and white plastic bobbing above the seagrass.
''Why all the litter?''I asked the hotel manager one morning.''Lubnan,''he said,using the Arabic word for Lebanon.''It's not our garbage,''he explained,pointing across the Mediterranean.''It's those idiots'over there.''
Take a drive north or south of the Lebanese capital of Beirut,and it's not hard to see where it all comes from. With space at a premium in this tiny nation of 10,000 square kilometres,all of the authorised landfill sites are full. Which means that most of the estimated 4000 tonnes of garbage produced each day by the country's 4.1 million people ends up in one of 800 illegal dump sites dotted around the country,many of them on the coast.
One of the most notorious is just south of the city of Sidon,where a colossal pile of trash about 30 to 40 metres high stretches for several hundred metres along the beach. Gradually eroded by the surf's ebb and flow,great clumps of garbage can be seen collapsing into the sea each week.
I drove down there myself this week,parked the car and clawed my way down to the shore and walked south. It was bearable enough until the slope gave way beneath a pile of rotting cattle heads,leaving a slimy grey mess on my brand-new Birkenstocks. The urge to throw up was strong.
Around the next bend,to my amazement,I spotted a man underneath another massive pile of rubbish,building a fire out of old plastic cords.
''Welcome,''the man yelled out in English.''Where are you from?''He told me his name was Walid.''Lebanon is very pretty,''he said.''If only people stopped putting the rubbish here.''
Exactly why he was building a fire in the middle of a hot summer's day he did not say. Back in Beirut,I rang a friend who is contracted to a European Union aid project aimed at helping Lebanon find a better way to manage its waste.
''The EU,the United States,the UN,lots of other countries are pouring money into Lebanon,urgently trying to prevent this mess from becoming a full-blown environmental catastrophe,''he told me.