Strategic garbage

Dr Chris Ciantar (The Sunday Times, August 17) confirms that the waste to be dumped at the proposed landfill at Mnajdra will be unseparated municipal and industrial waste - the Maghtab mix less the inert fraction, construction and demolition waste, which has been diverted to other sites.

To call such waste inert defies logic; to describe such a landfill as engineered is stretching things too far. Yes, it will cost us Lm2 million and a considerable part of this will be spent on preparing the site, lining it with impermeable bottom and side layers and finally capping it with another. Emissions will be flared or harnessed and monitoring will continue indefinitely. That's not the engineering most people have in mind when they speak of engineered landfills.

It's what goes into landfills that is most important. Had it been proposed to fill in the ugly scars left by quarrying with truly inert construction and demolition waste, the only objection would be about the expense of public money in a site rehabilitation process that should always have been the burden of the persons who made the scar in the first place.

By what reasoning can we be invited to accept that the rehabilitation of quarries that should never have been allowed to scar the area around Mnajdra, should cost us Lm2 million of public funds at a time of dire economic straits? It should have been a condition of the quarrymen's licence.

How can we be invited to believe that our municipal and industrial waste is inert? It's infuriating to suffer such a transparent attempt at misrepresentation of the facts. How can we even think of dumping it in a hole at Mnajdra?

Dr Ciantar claims that if we carried on with business as usual at Maghtab, the place would climb from 80 metres to 120 metres by 2004. It seems hard to believe. Construction and demolition waste accounting for 80 per cent of Maghtab - building material has been taken out of the equation. It has taken Maghtab 30 years to reach its present height; how can it get half as much higher in one year when the inflow of waste is reduced to 20 per cent?

Besides, the place will always be a poke in the eye until it is rehabilitated, no more at 120 than at 80 metres. How does transferring it to a visitor magnet such as Mnajdra reduce the tourism impact?

Should we go to the proposed trouble and expense, wrecking hopes of a heritage park at Mnajdra, for Maghtab to stay out of view? The height of Maghtab is a public relations issue. Are we sacrificing Mnajdra for public relations reasons?

What if Maghtab climbs a little higher? As it is, nobody can miss it anyway. What matters is that we have a waste reduction, reuse and recycling strategy implemented as soon as possible. The landfills at Mnajdra do not get us a day closer.

Dr Ciantar seems to have misunderstood the Solid Waste Management Strategy. The preparation of an engineered landfill site is targeted to precede waste separation because it is a technical problem that can be more easily addressed than that of mass education on separation.

At no time was it ever agreed that unseparated waste should be landfilled in an engineered landfill. Mass education should have started ages ago because it will take ages for us all to internalise the necessary values and learn the necessary skills.

Alternattiva Demokratika - the Green Party is fully prepared to back the choice of Maghtab/Ghallis but only as a properly engineered landfill and properly used as such. The "temporary transfer" of the Maghtab mess elsewhere makes no sense at all. Why is it being proposed?

Because we promised the EU? Are we saying that the EU will collapse if Malta falls back a year or two on its promises? Is it necessary to wreck Mnajdra to keep the EU happy? Are we nuts? Do we imagine the EU to be as crazy as we are, or are we just getting the hang of blaming the EU for our own failures?

It is incredible that an attempt to "appease" my concerns about the mixing of hazardous and non-hazardous waste in a Maghtab-like concoction limits itself to the statement that "a facility for the disposal of hazardous waste will be developed (at Ghallis) by the end of 2004... as part of the long-term project but within the timeframes of the interim facility".

Most of Wasteserv Ltd's clients don't know what waste is hazardous. How will they all fall in line by the end of 2004? And in the meantime? No significant public education campaign has been undertaken. In most towns the most basic separation of waste is not even dreamt of. How are we all to become familiar with the inevitable intricacies in so short a time? If it was that easy how come it hasn't happened yet?

The Mnajdra engineered dump will be closed and full to the brim of hazardous waste by the time Wasteserv's hazardous waste facility can deal with a significant fraction of the country's hazardous waste. Let's not kid each other, Mnajdra is too precious.

With all due respect to Dr Ciantar's technical qualifications, I still believe that nobody in his or her right mind could have the arrogance to guess the chemical composition of any unregulated dump. The promised but still undelivered X-ray of Maghtab will at best be a guesstimate. Nobody can tell when which container will leak what to change it all again. One must, in prudence, assume that any uncontrolled landfill is subject to a series of unpredicatable chemical timebombs. The same will apply to Mnajdra because its content will be the same: unknowable.

Everybody responsible is invited to bend over backwards to rethink the whole Mnajdra proposal. The Lm2 million earmarked for the project can be better used in finding a solution at Maghtab. The opportunity cost and forgone amenities at Mnajdra for all future time should also be put in the balance.

It has been very hard to cross swords with Dr Ciantar, who is a highly motivated and competent public servant who deserves and has my respect. I resent the fact that he has been required to act as the human shield for those who should contradict me on a political level: Ninu Zammit and his predecessor, Dr Francis Zammit Dimech.

The Maghtab disaster has been compounded by delay necessitated by the electoral constraints of the latter and the Mnajdra outrage has been proposed by the former, who remains unable to have a holisitc view of his responsibilities.

I would also like to see where all the other islands in the archipelago of government stand in all this. Could it be that Museums Department/Heritage Malta have nothing to say? How about the Malta Tourism Authority? Is the Minister of Tourism already too far removed from the scene to voice any concern? Will they and other public and private institutions make their representations to MEPA or will they duck their responsibilities? Is the Prime Minister too busy? Will he express his distaste after it's all over as he did over the St Angelo outrage? Will he ask our forgiveness again in five years' time? Will we ever forget?

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - the Green Party.