Flying in and out of Lebanon comes with its risks, and not just the usual suspects. There’s a real threat of bird strikes near Beirut’s airport. A risk that can cause catastrophic engine failures. I mean it has yet to happen, and it pales in comparison to the other risks you may face living here, but there is a risk and I do think about it a lot. Probably because I take the airport road, and see the birds at least twice a week on trips to my mom’s village. Bird interference is a global problem but at Beirut’s airport the chances for it are above average. 1 The nation’s coastline is essentially one continuous city, with almost nothing to offer the birds. But then there is the Costa Brava Solid Waste Landfill, a feeding ground for resident birds and migratory species moving along the world’s second-busiest flyway. 2 Lebanon is that tiny choke point in the middle of the migration hour-glass that connects the birds of Euro-Asia to the African continent.

The landfill sits one road away from Lebanon’s only commercial airport—99.2% closer than the most basic safety standards allow. 3 Seven months after the landfill opened, the former transportation minister came out to thank God for giving us only near-misses. 4 I don’t know who deserves the credit, but my cousin told me that he and other Middle East Airline (MEA) pilots have techniques to dodge birds when flying in and out of Beirut.

 

 

Why is this landfill so close to the airport?

 

We don’t know why it was placed there for sure, but it might have to do with logistical convenience or the marginalization of Ouzai, the nearby residential area. Already being systematically excluded from politics, they were unlikely to cause any trouble. The landfill rapidly emerged and opened its gates in April 2016 as a partial solution to Lebanon’s 2015 trash crisis. 5

 

Recent facebook post on the Costa Brava Beach Resort page.

 

It took its name from a neighboring private beach resort owned by an entrepreneurial man who took the name from a world famous picturesque coastline in Spain’s autonomous region of Catalonia. It was a slim disguise considering this stretch of Lebanese coast has long been a pollution hotspot. 6 But the name worked well and the Costa Brava Beach Resort remained a popular escape among beachgoers until 2016. That’s when political authorities scandalously appropriated the owner’s vision of naming things what they are absolutely not. They pushed the name beyond its capacity and widespread media coverage turned it into a household term plainly synonymous with trash. The tarnishing of the brand is kind of tragic. And if the owner decided to tell his story using the name he coined, it wouldn’t catch on—since the bitter irony of false escape has already been claimed by the award-winning film Costa Brava.

 

 

Lost opportunities

 

In February 2018 a good friend introduced me to Samir, the owner, so we can use his beach resort to sneak access to the landfill’s coastline, sample the seawater, and study the area’s current levels of pollution. He stood facing the landfill the entire time we were sampling, muttering things under his breath. When we finished, Samir insisted we see the wedding venue he built in 2016. He told us that barely anyone comes since the landfill opened. He also asked me to like his Facebook page, which let me know he isn’t giving up the pursuit for business.

The landfill operates under a Public Private Partnership (PPP) with City Blue. PPPs are long term agreements between the government and a private partner. They run public services like shameless monopolies. They control services such as electricity, telecommunications, water supply, wastewater treatment, healthcare, transportation, education, solid waste management, and nearly everything else. Lebanon’s power brokers are usually in a theater of disagreement. But PPPs bring them together. They’re key to understanding how the state regularly flips failed public services into business opportunities. 7 After the service fails, the state pretends to be more bankrupt than it is, and PPPs are positioned as the obvious solution. For the landfill, the state skipped over a standard environmental and social impact assessment as part of the 40-year anniversary for their favorite cover story: ‘It’s an emergency.’ And they gave themselves anniversary presents; the first being payouts for each ton of waste that enters Costa Brava ($154 per ton which is 900% more than neighboring countries), 8 and the second being the possibility of using waste and rubble from war to make new high-value property where there was once a sea. The lucrative process of land reclamation has already been carried out a few times. BIEL, or ‘Beirut Waterfront,’ was once a dump for trash and the remnants of civil war. It’s now prime real estate for top clubs, gyms, and restaurants. 9 Costa Brava opened as a temporary landfill until “a better solution is found,” but that never came. 10 Nine years later, Costa Brava continues progressing towards its land reclamation goal now with quiet dumping of postwar rubble from the recently destroyed buildings in Beirut’s Dahiyeh district. As the face of the PPP profiting off the landfill, City Blue dumps between 200 to 1,000 tons of municipal waste at the landfill daily. If you remove the items birds don’t intentionally eat, there’s enough food everyday for at least 1.6 million medium-sized birds. If we take a slow dumping day and assume only 5% of the edibles are accessible, there’s still enough food for 65,000 birds.

Airport officials tried their best to hide the threat at first. But there was a significant near miss and an information leak. Once news outlets picked up on it, public authorities vowed to work quickly with MEA to come up with a plan. In January 2017, the decision was made to pay 125 people, give them ammunition, and let them enter the Costa Brava Landfill where, over three days, they killed around 10,000 birds. There’s about a million birds in the Greater Beirut Area at any given time so they may have solved the problem for two or three days. The state sponsored bird massacre sparked some controversy and back-lash from activists. But as far as we can tell, authorities are not relying on any proven methods for deterring birds from the area such as reducing the number of perching sites, installing devices that emit distressed bird calls, predator bird calls, ultrasonic noises, undesirable scents, or safe chemical repellents; placing predator decoys, light reflectors, netting, or laser systems around the landfill;  11 using pyrotechnics like automated acoustic explosives or propane cannons; systematically and rapidly covering all exposed and arriving waste with soil; or moving the supposedly temporary landfill somewhere else where it doesn’t violate international safety standards. 12 Instead, every so often, the chairman of MEA threatens to bring the bird hunters back to shoot it up in an amazing and symbolic display of what the actual hell are we doing.

 


Reclaimed land from the Costa Brava landfill between 2016 and 2024

 

 

Doubling down

 

As you may be gathering, solutions in this situation, as with many others in the country, only stand a chance of being implemented if they are extraordinary. If they take evidence or proven methods too seriously, their chances of being brought forward shrink. For some, the spectacle of the state allowing men to hunt possibly endangered migratory birds at a chokepoint in the world’s second busiest migratory flyway in green camouflage that blatantly stands out against a landfill of vibrantly colored plastic makes for surreal confusion. For others, it passes as a straightforward solution. I’ve been in academia, trying to imagine and carry out alternatives to Lebanon’s social and environmental problems for about 10 years now. I’ve learned the hard way that if you intend to do something about our perpetual state of emergency, you must avoid the underlying drivers and remain within the performance of solution-like things. You gotta cleverly keep the lucrative emergency alive if your thing is going to have a chance at passing through the political establishment.

Below, I’ll distance myself from scholarly activism and reinterpret the evidence to give a straightforward roadmap on dealing with the Costa Brava bird problem. I know we have much bigger problems to performatively solve in Lebanon, but this one is for the diaspora that love visiting as much as possible, and for the privileged residents who have the ability to regularly travel in and out. I imagine things in solidarity with both, moving from my upbringing abroad to life as a privileged resident.

 

 

Solution-like things for the future

 

The first step is to strip those bird magnets off the wings and fuselages of MEA. You can’t have trees sticking out in a grey backdrop and expect birds to not fly toward them. Despite everything Lebanese birds have gone through, they still love trees. And when a bunch of MEA planes are parked next to one another, the birds probably see them as a small forest. Many of these animals are tired after traveling thousands of miles and overcoming untold struggles across many lands. And if they reside in Lebanon’s cities, they’re  always tired with practically no trees along the perpetually urban coast. When the birds see that flat, elongated version of the iconic cedar tree—chosen by MEA’s graphic designers and painted in massive scale across the tail wing with hundreds of green perch points not found anywhere else in the area—they’re naturally going to flock toward it.

At a height of 11.8 meters, the cedars on MEA’s tail wings fall squarely within the average range of adult cedars, which stand at 10–18 meters tall. Painted in a beautiful shade of green, the birds have many reasons to think these are real trees. We must immediatly remove all the trees from MEA’s planes and replace them with something birds will avoid, like scarecrows or, better yet, predators. I know MEA put a lot of money into painting their planes but you can’t put a price on people’s lives. Also, taking the trees off the planes today will be a strategic business move for tomorrow. By shifting the branding away from the cedar tree, MEA can save themselves from an awkward future where their brand has cedars but the country does not, given their imminent decline amid climate change and habitat loss.

MEA might consider the flaming Phoenix: another national symbol that also happens to look like a predator who can deter birds. It remains safely mythical, so the marketing team doesn’t have to worry about it going extinct in the wild. They say the Phoenix can live in fire and rises from the ashes of its predecessors. In doing so, it captures the essence of the PPPs that shaped the Lebanon we know today. After burning the people they are meant to serve, PPPs self-immolate, then re-emerge as a newly branded mythical hero promising to save us from past evils—as though they weren’t the ones that created them in the first place. Unlike the vulnerable cedar, the Phoenix is timelessly Lebanese and would make for a great centerpiece in MEAs branding. They may not be able to fight fire with fire—using PPPs to fix failed PPPs—but I think they can fight birds with firebirds.

So, step one: replace the fragile cedar trees on MEA’s tail wings with a symbol that better represents us and our resistance to self-destruction. If that doesn’t keep the birds away from the planes, then sure, Mr. Chairman—bring those hunters back. But let’s work together to maximize the chances of making each shot count.

The hunters need to rethink their camouflage. I get this is probably the first time they try to shoot birds in a field of plastic trash. I don’t blame them for coming to the landfill wearing the typical greens and browns found in hunting camouflage. Anyone might make that mistake. But it’s funny because that’s what’s making them stick out among the blues, whites, and punchy colors of the plastic they’re standing on.

Birds have 3-10 times better vision than humans. I bet they saw the hunters from miles away. If we’re bringing them back, hunters need to follow a dress code that camouflages them in Costa Brava. For the guys that like to prepare their outfit ahead of time, I’ll technically break down the plastic foliage in Costa Brava. Polypropylene (PP) is the main thing you’re gonna find down there at 22.1% followed by low density polyethylene (LDPE) at 20.8%, and high density polyethylene (HDPE) at 16.9%. 13 Where the landfill meets the coast, you’re going to find the majority of individual plastic items are cigarette butts at 39% followed by plastic caps and lids at 13%; cutlery and plates at 9%; crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, and lolly sticks at 8%; and bags at 2%. 14

 

Lebanese Middle East Airlines (MEA) planes are pictured at the tarmac of Beirut international airport, Lebanon February 16, 2020. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir

 

For the hunters who just want to get down there and into the action: I suggest throwing on old clothes, smearing them with glue, and just pressing handfuls of trash straight onto the body. Professionals call this “local concealment” or “brushing in.” What’s useful about this
solution is that the Lebanese hunter tends to smoke cigarettes and snack while waiting for birds to come. Now, they can just stick the smoked cigarettes, crisp packets, or whatever trash they produce anywhere on themselves to improve camouflage. The more trash they produce while hunting the more they can blend in. I suspect if all hunters are outfitted in trash, they’re not only gonna have a lot more fun shooting down more birds, MEA is going to save a lot of money on bullets next time around. Mastering this new method of camouflage can be considered a form of adaptation that works across landscapes. Given the dramatic rise of plastic consumption and open trash dumping in Lebanon, the material now indiscriminately reaches a wide range of conventional hunting grounds. With more waste dumps than municipalities (i.e., 1,065), it’s hard to know for certain what types of plastic are in each. Therefore, I suggest hunters master the second technique of outfitting with trash when they get to whatever spot they’re hunting that day. Also, if the hunters are coming back, for the love of God don’t pay them. For all we know the hunters who were contracted in 2017 may have been half-cocked wannabees chasing a paycheck, themselves among the 33% of the country living in poverty. 15 The best hunters do this for sport, not for money. What needs to happen next time is a wide-reaching advertisement inviting Lebanon’s hunters down to a free for all at Costa Brava. MEA can hire a few bouncers at the entrance to check that everyone is within dress code. Per capita, Lebanon has the second highest wild bird killing rates in the region. 16

That’s because pretty much every male has gone hunting. A good advertisement will attract hundreds if not thousands of professionals with the sportsmanship to wear the trash and forget the cash.

This is a repeatable model that’s deployable at a fraction of the costs incurred by MEA in 2017. If they do this every season for long enough, evolutionary forces will cause the birds to stop migrating over Lebanon altogether. At that point, we can consider permanently putting the landfill inside the airport, just west of runway 2, where there’s a lot of vacant land.

While we continue incentivizing the birds to reroute, another parallel action could be taken. MEA Airlines can launch a Costa Brava NGO in partnership with City Blue to support the area’s small and medium enterprises, i.e. beach resorts. The NGO would generate revenue by charging hunters to enter the landfill, as if it were a shooting range. All proceeds would be directed at the area’s struggling beach resorts. But the majority share would go to Samir, as compensation for all the trademark violations. It’s important that such funding remains conditional. It may only be used to throw epic firework shows for couples who choose to have their wedding at a local beach resort. Birds hate loud bangs and flashy lights whereas people love them. Samir had a dream, and only MEA has the power to bring it back. Through better symbolism, camouflage, and the Costa Brava NGO, things can happen. And sometimes, we can give airline passengers a glittery little celebration when they make it in and out of Lebanon.

 

 

 

 

  1. https://stateofmind13.com/2017/01/11/beiruts-airport-is-not-safe-for-air-travel-anymore-a-disaster-could-happen-at-any-moment/→
  2. https://flightforsurvival.org/countries/lebanon/→
  3. https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/150-5200-34a/150_5200_34a.pdf→
  4. https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-lebanon-airport-birds-2017-story.html→
  5. https://civilsociety-centre.org/party/social-movement-responding-lebanese-garbage-crisis→
  6. https://www.cnrs.edu.lb/Library/→
  7. https://jacobin.com/2020/08/beirut-lebanon-disaster-capitaism-neoliberalism→
  8. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/09/lebanon-huge-cost-inaction-trash-crisis→
  9. https://timourazhari.wordpress.com/2017/07/19/the-lucrative-history-of-lebanese-land-reclamation/→
  10. https://ejatlas.org/conflict/costa-brava-landfill-lebanon→
  11. https://birdcontrolgroup.com/→
  12. https://www.iswa.org/blog/download-the-3rd-landfill-operations-guidelines/?v=3e8d115eb4b3→
  13. Kayed & al. (2022) Single Use Plastics in Lebanon. Online: https://www.wes-med.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/N-E-LB-2b-2022.12-MedWaves-Report.pdf→
  14. https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/bitstreams/9739/retrieve→
  15. https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2025-07/report_socioeconomic-impacts-lebanon-2024-war-english.pdf→
  16. P. Issa, 2018, Associated Press, New Hunting Law Falls Prey to Old Habits in Lebanon. Online: https://apnews.com/article/6e4207d3fa7a4003a5c62e644bdb8ad5→