Interim Landfill Terminal Damage

The Malta Independent 

Neglect leads to crisis. Crisis leads to panic. Panic leads to patch-ups. Patch-ups lead to interim solutions and permanent damage. That is the sorry story of waste management in Malta.

On a speck of this densely populated island, waste management is an environmental menace and challenge. It should be clear that the only real and lasting solution, regarding which we are a couple of decades late, depends on the successful implementation of the three R’s. Reduce, Re-use, and Re-cycle as it goes which is easier said than done as it needs a lot of investment in consumer education, unpleasant enforcement and top quality management.

Reduce involves the implementation of separation at source, at household level, to raise public awareness on the need to reduce waste by opting for the re-usable rather than the disposable, and to favour organic waste solutions over inorganic ones.

Re-use involves the creating of projects that could make immediate re-use of building waste. In an island which is too small for our ego it should be fairly simple to conclude that land reclamation projects should be ongoing, offering an immediate disposal point for the development generated building waste. The current practice of disposing out at sea of such waste generated by large waterfront projects is an offence against proper resource management.

Re-cycle should help to make optimum use of organic waste which hopefully, through an education programme, will largely replace the excessive quantity of inorganic waste which is harder and more expensive to re-cycle.

Yet because we have a fatigued administration that thinks that problems can be solved by report writing and pure positive talk, we are ‘blessed’ with a Maghtab that has disgraced our shoreline and contaminated our coastal sea water and we are now just about to create similar mini-dump sites next to one of the most prestigious pre-historic treasures.

It is evident that placing a dump site anywhere, whether engineered or just disgracefully disorganised, is going to meet the ire of whoever lives, works or has investment within a few miles radius. This means there is not a dot on this island where a dump-site could be placed without meeting resistance. If it is in the north it is within walking distance from some tourist location, hotel or attraction. If it is in the south it is adding to an overburdened region which already hosts our power stations, our dockyard, most of our industrial estates, sewage plant and organic waste re-cycling plant amongst other source of environmental menaces. If it is in the centre it is next to densely populated areas, cultural monuments or pre-historic treasures.

So clearly the aim should be to avoid the need to have any landfill, which is just euphemism for the traditional brash sounding dump, by the proper application of the 3 R’s concept.

This makes me wonder why Labour had to make us suffer so much by keeping in office a government that has largely lost control of the domestic situation and is constrained to panic emergency measure rather than the application of long-term solutions. The more people I meet, the more I realise that the electorate did not actually vote for this incompetence but for the desire to have discipline imposed on us by the EU.

Labour’s inability to smell the electoral risk of bundling the EU issue with the election outcome remains a strategic mistake of unpardonable proportions which constrains us to suffer the lethargy of an administration that has outlived its ability to remain vigilant and effective.