Lebanon's southern city of Sidon is best known for its Crusader castle and ancient market, but a more modern landmark has marred its Mediterranean shoreline for decades - a towering "mountain" of trash.

In the summer, reeking fumes hang over the city, and fires break out at the dump. Rubbish washes out to sea, reaching Cyprus, 260 km away in the Mediterranean, and is pushed across the city by winter storms.

But now an ambitious project is putting an end to the towering nightmare, transforming it into a seaside park that local officials hope will inspire others dealing with Lebanon's many dumps.

"We were talking about ... a trash mountain right next to houses," said Mayor Mohammed al-Saudi, who came to office in the city of 200,000 pledging to deal with the dump.

"It's gone from a 58-meter trash mountain to an 8-meter green mound. ... We've cleaned up the sewage, and the trash mountain is gone."

The project began with the installation of a sea wall around the eyesore site and the coastline to the south, preventing waves from impeding work or taking rubbish out to sea.

Then the site was closed to further deliveries, with the city's waste going to a new processing facility farther south.

The mountain started life as a dump for rubble about 10 years into the country's 1975-1990 civil war, and tests showed around 60 percent of the heap was material from destroyed buildings.

When sorting began in mid-2013, much of that rubble was treated and used to reclaim land between the sea wall and the beach in the area south of the dump.

Next year, 33,000 square meters of that land will open as a public park, planted with hundred-year-old olive trees and featuring a small amphitheater.

The rest of the dump was plowed into a sanitary landfill, lined and covered with protective plastic membranes.

Pipes running through it will filter gas and remove effluent, and grass will be planted on top, but the landfill will be off-limits to the public for eight years while the material underneath decomposes.

'Mountain of shame'

The project is "moving from that mountain of shame to something that Sidon will be very proud of, hopefully," said Edgard Chehab from the United Nations Development Programme, which oversaw the project.

"In eight years' time, the landfill site will be joined with the green park that we are constructing now, and Sidon will enjoy 100,000 square meters of green park," he said.

But not everyone is impressed.

Mohammed Sarji, president of the Lebanese Union of Professional Divers and founder of the Bahr Lubnan (Sea of Lebanon) NGO, is angry that the land reclamation has covered over a long stretch of Sidon's sandy beach.

The landfill and park occupy 96,000 square meters of the 550,000 square meters of reclaimed land, and Sarji questioned who would benefit from the rest of the newly created and potentially lucrative beachfront real estate.

He said activists presented the municipality with a plan to recycle almost all of the trash mountain over a three-year period, for $10 million less than the current project cost.

(China Daily 12/12/2014 page10)