The issue of waste disposal was again at the center of public and political attention.
Despite the steps taken, the Cyprus still does not manage to effectively cope with waste management, and the threat of fines from the European Union is becoming more and more real.
The problem of recycling and processing waste on the island continues to deteriorate. Recent discussions in the Parliamentary Environmental Protection Committee showed: a breakdown in the waste management system caused by the termination of cooperation between Green Dot and Barracuda, aggravated the crisis. One of the main problems is a low level of garbage sorting before its burial. As the deputy from the Akel party Nikos Kettiros noted, "a partial division of waste exists, but basically garbage still falls on landfills without sorting, which directly contradicts the EU requirements."
Kettiros also emphasized that the garbage processing plant in Kosi, originally designed to maintain Larnaki and Famagusta, now accepts waste from Nikosia. As a result, they do not have time to process the processing, so a significant part of the waste is simply buried in the ground.
“We are already paying fines for this,” he says. “The European Union considers this approach a violation of environmental standards.”
According to the Chairman of the Committee for the Protection of the Environmental Environment Haralambos, the theopempt, annually about 70,000 tons of waste is disposed of in Cyprus. This happens not only in Kosi, but also in pathos and at the Pentacomo training ground, which, as recognized, does not function properly.
Since 2018, the European Union has provided Cyprus for a six -year term to introduce a separate food collection system - by January 2024 it was supposed to be launched. But in practice, in six years, no significant changes have occurred.
“If we started sorting organic waste, the burial volumes could be reduced by half,” explains to theopempta. However, today the containers at the training grounds are almost crowded, and plans are already being developed to create new cells for disposal.
Among the decisions under consideration - the expansion of the plant’s capacities in Kosi and the construction of a new waste processing unit in Nicosia in order to reduce the load on existing objects.
It is important to note that the European Union does not require countries to create factories for sorting waste - sorting should occur at the level of households. However, it is here that Cyprus faces a serious challenge: the lack of an information campaign and understandable instructions for the population makes effective sorting impossible.
Citizens often do not know how to properly separate the waste, where to throw out organics and what materials are subject to processing. As a result, even in the presence of infrastructure, the system does not work.
Source: Reporter.com.cy
