Palestinians use recycling as Israel's restrictions trigger a trash crisis

The heightened restrictions on movement make every aspect of life more difficult for the 3.4 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, in particular the collection and disposal of garbage. Eleanor Beardsley/NPR hide caption

RAMALLAH, West Bank - In a dimly-lit cement block warehouse near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the start-up dreams of two young entrepreneurs are beginning to take shape.

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Several machines hum away as they sort, wash, dry, shred and melt plastic garbage – spitting it out as recycled pellets to be used again.

"From waste plastic to raw material again," explains mechanical engineer Ibrahim Ghazal, who sifts through a handful of pellets from a bag weighing several tons. Ghazal is one of the co-founders of this start-up recycling operation called Scrapcycle Solutions.

Mechanical engineer Ibrahim Ghazal is one of the co-founders of this start-up recycling operation called Scrapcycle Solution. Eleanor Beardsley/for NPR hide caption

Friends since childhood, Ghazal and his business partner Faris Abu Keshek got the idea for the recycling startup after the war in Gaza started and life in this occupied Palestinian territory got a lot more difficult.

The tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians who worked in Israel before the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel are no longer allowed to cross into the Jewish state. And checkpoints and controls on movement within the West Bank itself have proliferated. The Israeli military has installed massive concrete and metal gates around Palestinian villages to close them off whenever it deems necessary, and hundreds of new checkpoints have been put in place.

Faris Abu Keshek stands with sacks of recycled plastic pellets. Eleanor Beardsley/NPR hide caption

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented 925 checkpoints, barriers or roadblocks across the West Bank at the end of 2025. Some 43% more than in the preceding 20 years, it said.

Stray dogs and smoldering piles of trash

Garbage trucks are parked outside the transfer station waiting for the optimum time to try to get through all the additional Israeli checkpoints set up around the West Bank since October 7, 2023. Eleanor Beardsley/NPR hide caption

Scrapcycle Solutions sits across from the main garbage transfer point in Ramallah. Before the war, this site was usually cleared every day, say the young entrepreneurs. But these days it looks more like a landfill because they can't get the garbage out. Abu Keshek estimates there are around 750 tons of garbage here. The site is teeming with birds, and stray dogs roam everywhere.

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This transfer station caught fire a few years ago, smoldering for nearly two weeks and releasing toxic fumes into the air.

Dozens of trucks are fully loaded with garbage covered and held down with tarps. They sit for hours or even days along the road out front, waiting for the best time to attempt crossing through all the Israeli checkpoints to reach one of the West Bank landfills.

Ghazal says the trip is a long and dangerous process.

"They spend hours at the check points," he says. "The settlers sometimes attack the truck drivers. It's very difficult to transfer the waste from here."

In addition, he says the West Bank only has two landfills – one in the north and one in the south. The Palestinian Authority (the Palestinian government in charge of civilian issues in some areas of the West Bank) has appealed for years to open a third one in the center of the West Bank, says Gazhal. But Israel has refused and he believes it's on purpose.

"They want the people to feel the pressure," he says. "They don't want us to think that we can live comfortably. They want us to know that 'we can control where you go, we can control where your garbage goes, we control every aspect of your life. You have no freedom.'"

In a statement, the Israeli military told NPR that it "is advancing on a construction permit for a third landfill in Judea and Samaria," using the Biblical name for the land Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 war and has since kept under Israeli military control.

Abu Keshek says the landfills will soon reach capacity, so they are not a permanent solution to the garbage problem. What is desperately needed for this densely populated place is large-scale recycling. Eleanor Beardsley/NPR hide caption

Scaling up

Abu Keshek says he called his partner from the facility. "When I saw how they operate and how it's done and how it's supposed to be done I was astonished," he says. "I called Ibrahim at that exact moment and told him I can't believe what I'm seeing. You could see many tons of compressed plastic in one place, cardboards in one place, they had all the metals in one place…"

The two entrepreneurs say they want the West Bank to have a plant like this, something that other countries consider normal.

They have approached international agencies and NGOs for funding, like the JICA, the Japan International Cooperation Agency. It's the Japanese equivalent of the U.S.' now-dismantled USAID.

Firas Farsakh is the director of JICA's Ramallah office. He sees the daily difficulties Palestinians face living under Israeli military occupation.

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"So garbage is not just garbage," he says. "It reflects all the political situation on the ground. It shows you how difficult it is to accomplish anything in this challenging area."

Abu Keshek and Ghazal decided to start small. They began with plastics, which they say make up around 16% of West Bank garbage.

They have managed to get some help from one outside quarter. Professor Arthur Dong teaches infrastructure finance at Georgetown University's McDonough school of business. Dong's masters class helped put together a feasibility study for Scrapcycle Solutions. He says the recycling project resonated on many different levels.

"It's a recycling solution that is desperately needed because the West Bank is a very confined area and their landfills are pretty much at capacity," he says. "So from an environmental point of view and because of the Israeli occupation, it's a community that is in desperate need to address this long-term problem of how to dispose of waste."

Abu Keshek and Ghazal say there are 72 manufacturers in the West Bank that can use their plastic pellets.

As a result, the entrepreneurs say even though the roadblocks are huge in the West Bank, their business is viable and they have no plans to give up.

"This is the challenge for us," says Abu Keshek. "This is what makes us work harder."

Ghazal agrees. "We don't quit. It's not in our dictionary," he says. "We have to fight what's going on around us. We have be patient, we have to be ambitious, we have to continue through all of that. Not only for us, but for the Palestinian people."