A mountain of shame

The Maghtab problem has been with us for a long time, well over 20 years.

Each year it has grown higher mainly due to construction waste being dumped at this site. Three years ago, as a member of the Maghtab action committee, we had suggested to Dr Zammit Dimech that construction waste should be either used for sea reclamation or else dumped into spent quarries. We were not heeded. We met regularly and we repeated the same solution ad nauseam but still we were not listened to.

Now, three years later the system of dumping into quarries has started. If the politicians had listened to our constructive suggestions Maghtab today would have been around 3.5 million tons in volume less than it is. The bottom line is that today the Maghtab mountain is a mountain of shame and must have a record for the number of reports left waiting on the shelves in someone's office.

As if this is not enough, a crazy decision has now been taken to develop an engineered landfill immediately next to Maghtab, 500 metres away from our hotel and in the heart of Malta's most popular tourist area. It is important that people understand what this landfill is all about and what the repercussions would be.

Primarily an area of 300 tumoli of land will be excavated. Our hotel stands on an area of 30 tumoli. The area of the landfill will be 10 times the size of the land on which the hotel stands. The next step would be the excavation of 3.5 million cubic metres of rock, which is mainly garigue. It is rather difficult to imagine a hole in the ground with a volume of 3.5 million cubic metres. It is equivalent to the construction material dumped at Maghtab for a period of three years. Apart from all this, it is obvious that machinery will be brought to the site to crush the rocks at source. This landfill then becomes an ongoing massive building site. All this is very near to the most popular tourist resort of our islands.

One has to keep in mind the fact that today other countries are doing away with landfills and adopting incineration systems for waste disposal. There are other solutions that should be adopted which would cause no harm to anybody.

First and foremost, the landfill planned is to serve for a period of 20 years. Is there need for this? I say definitely not. What we should be looking at is a landfill to serve for a period of not more than five years. Nowadays technology is moving at such a fast rate that systems of incineration will eliminate the need of landfills. A landfill to serve five years will require a much smaller portion of land and this will open possibilities of areas which are away both from habitation as well as tourism zones. This period can then be used to determine the introduction of incineration.

But waste management goes much further than this. In my opinion in order to solve the waste problem the following needs to be done:

1. Develop the infrastructure for waste separation with a view to recycling as large a percentage as possible of the waste generated.

2. Explore possibilities of reducing waste and apply.

3. Upgrade the Sant'Antnin plant to work to full capacity.

4. Develop a small landfill to serve for the next few years.

5. Develop the infrastructure for incineration.

6. Undertake a massive education campaign (such as the seat-belt campaign) to ensure that everybody understands and adopts the infrastructure of waste generation. Legislate and enforce.

7. Use construction waste for land reclamation.

This is the way forward for waste management - a way which will solve Malta's waste problem without shooting ourselves in the foot and putting our most important industry in jeopardy.

Mr Zahra is group managing director, Island Hotels Group.