Every year, around 25 million shots are fired in Lebanon and the majority, if not all cartridges, are left behind by hunters in forests and mountains. Hunting cartridge is extremely harmful to nature especially the plastic type that could take hundreds of years to decompose and harm crops as well as groundwaters and rivers.

For that sake, Live Love Volunteer, Live Love Beirut’s Volunteering program, organized a cleanup day with their program partner Live Lebanon UNDP, and in collaboration with the National Commission For Lebanese Women in Eghbeh and Amaz, Keserwan area. Other volunteers headed to Douma in Batroun and Bmohray in the Chouf. They managed to pick up thousands of empty shot cartridges left by hunters. Lebanese Olympics trap shooting champion Ray Bassil, head of the national committee for Lebanese Women Claudine Aoun Roukoz, Lebanese Champion Silvio Chiha as well as volunteers from Jordan, Lybia, Germany & Tunisia joined the initiative. All the cartridges were placed in a warehouse and will soon be recycled.

Achieving a cartridge-free environment is still a far-fetched goal but this is an encouraging start. What needs to be done though is come up with a proper hunting law and be able to enforce it because the real problem are unethical hunters who shoot down anything that moves and who couldn’t care less about leaving empty cartridges behind.