A total of 352 tonnes of material were sent for recycling last year, WasteServ's hazardous waste management planner Henrietta Debono said yesterday.

Ms Debono, who was addressing a seminar on Waste Separation - What's the Big Deal?, organised by WasteServ Malta Ltd and the Cleaner Technology Centre, said the material sent for recycling was made up of paper (77 per cent), tyres (nine per cent), monitors and computers (six per cent), plastic (five per cent), cardboard (two per cent) and aluminium cans (one per cent).

Ms Debono said that 878 tonnes of material were recovered for recycling. This was made up of paper (489.35 tonnes), tyres (188.09 tonnes), glass (59.1 tonnes), plastic (50.1 tonnes), cardboard (48.19 tonnes), aluminium cans (22 tonnes) and monitors (21.5 tonnes).

More than half, or 761,931 tonnes, of the 1,298,202 tonnes of inert material dumped last year was disposed of in disused quarries.

Introducing the seminar, Chris Ciantar, WasteServ's head of strategy, communications and development, said waste separation was one of the major and toughest challenges in the waste management strategy.

Its purpose was to reduce the amount of waste being dumped. The dumping of waste required management, to which an expense was associated.

Dr Ciantar noted that one had to pay 33c per tonne to dump waste at Maghtab. But the government required Lm10 to treat that tonne and that money had to come from the people.

Ms Debono said that sustainable waste management was about using resources more efficiently, reducing the amount of waste produced, dealing with waste in a way that would help achieve sustainable development and bearing in mind that a material one considered waste could be of use to others.

To achieve sustainable waste management, one needed to consider a number of principles, namely reduction, reuse, recycling, recovery and disposal.

The best practical environmental option was that which provided the most benefits or the least damage to the environment as a whole at acceptable cost - in the long as well as the short term.

Ms Debono said that waste should be treated or disposed of as near as possible to the point where it was generated - the overall aim of this principle was to achieve self-sufficiency at a national level.

She said that where there were threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing cost effective measures to prevent environmental damage.

Polluters, she said, should bear the full cost of the consequences of their actions.

The potential environmental and human health costs of producing, treating and disposing of waste should be reflected in the price of products and the charges associated with the management of waste, Ms Debono said.