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James Debono
The government does not know how much waste is being dumped in the five, privately-owned inert landfills, which are attracting more construction waste away from Wasteserv’s own landfill in Siggiewi.
“This data is not yet available to us,” a spokesperson for the Ministry for the Environment told MaltaToday.
The amount of waste handled by national waste management company Wasteserv is expected to go down from the record 2.2 million cubic metres in 2004, to an estimated 900,000 cubic meters by the end of this year, because more building contractors are choosing the cheaper private quarries to dispose their waste.
Wasteserv’s head of operations Chris Ciantar attributed this decrease to the removal of subsidies to contractors, who as from 2005 had to start paying the full sum of Lm1.18 for every tonne of construction waste they dispose of at the Siggiewi landfill.
Contractors speaking to MaltaToday said that disposing waste in private quarries was less expensive.
According to the ministry spokesperson, the five landfills are privately-owned quarries operating in line with permits issued by MEPA. The spokesperson also said there are no standard guidelines for the management of these landfills, as permits are case specific.
The lack of information on the amount of waste dumped in private quarries raises questions on what sort of monitoring is taking place on these landfills. The mixing of inert material with other kinds of waste could result in the contamination of underground water.
The Malta Environment and Planning Authority has so far not answered MaltaToday’s questions on how many people are employed to monitor these private landfills to ascertain that only construction waste is being dumped in these quarries.
The lack of information on the amount of waste dumped in private quarries also makes it impossible to determine whether targets identified in the Solid Waste Management Strategy are being kept.
This plan stipulated that by 2005 construction waste should be reduced by 20 per cent, whilst 60 per cent of the rock had to be recovered, as well as 50 percent from mixed inert waste from construction and demolition.
What seems certain is that with more waste dumped in private quarries, even less waste is being recovered, reused or recycled because the owners of the landfills have no obligation to recycle any part of their waste.
In the first eight months of this year, the amount of recycled construction material recycled by Wasteserv amounted to 86,500 tonnes, approximately 14.4 per cent of the material handled by the company.
None of the waste in the private quarries has been recycled.
“These quarries serve as landfills and as such, waste received by these facilities is merely disposed of,” the ministry spokesperson said.
In the absence of recycling, it will only take a few years before all available quarries are filled, putting more pressure on the need for land reclamation projects, like the artificial island proposed by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi in July.
jdebono@mediatoday.com.mt
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