Recycling, a necessity more than a choice for Syrians in rebel areas

June 11, 2023

At a giant landfill in the rebel enclave of northwestern Syria, Mohammad Behlal and his sons are looking for plastic to recycle into multicolored rugs, a painful but vital job.

“We get tired, we suffer the smell of waste and dirt,” sighs this 39-year-old man, his head covered with a red and white checkered keffiyeh. “But at least we can make a living.”

Injured in the leg while fighting in the ranks of the rebels in the region of Aleppo (north), taken over by the Syrian regime, Mr. Behlal, father of six children, has no job prospects.

He collects with his bare hands, with two of his children, plastic and metal cans, in piles of garbage in Hezreh, near the Turkish border.

Nearby, others pick up pieces of metal or glass in this landfill, some using shovels and pickaxes.

They put them in bags and resell them in exchange for a weekly income of seven to ten dollars per person.

In rebel areas of Syria, where almost 90% of the population depends on humanitarian aid, recycling is more of a necessity than an option.

“We buy plastic picked up by children or offered by street vendors,” says Farhan Sleiman, 29, in chastised Arabic.

“We expose ourselves to the risk of contracting (…) cholera, or chronic diseases”, adds the man with the neat beard, complaining “of the pestilential odors and the flies”.

Mr. Sleiman works in a center where the plastic is sorted, crushed and disinfected before being transformed into small balls.

These are then sold to factories in the region, such as that of Khaled Rachou, which uses the recycled plastic to make carpets.

His know-how, Mr. Rachou inherited it from his grandfather who had held a factory for more than fifty years south of Idleb (north-west). “We have more than 30 employees,” he boasts, in front of the huge machines in his factory.

Patterns in the shape of blue and white diamonds or beige and brown tiles: in Maarat Mesrine, Mohammed al-Qassem sells these carpets made of recycled plastic, in several sizes and colors.

Their cost varies between five and 15 dollars, compared to an average of one hundred dollars for Persian-style rugs.

The demand for carpets is strong in the rebel regions of northern Syria, which has four million inhabitants, more than half of whom are displaced people who had to flee the areas conquered by the regime.

They are mainly used to furnish the makeshift dwellings or the tents in which the displaced are piled up.