The abattoir incinerator

In the interview entitled Climate Change "Shared By Everyone" (May 29) Chistopher Ciantar, director of environmental policy and initiatives at the Environment Ministry, says that he's "starting to lose hope" on the environment in Malta - quite disillusioning given that he's only been at his post for a few months.

He gives a number of examples illustrating how the environment is everybody's responsibility, and not only his ministry's, and how each and every one of us is contributing to climate change. Granted, but I'll come back to this point later .

Dr Ciantar proceeds to inform us that the ministry is contemplating doing away with a hospital waste treatment facility at Mater Dei Hospital and considering burning the hospital stuff at the abattoir incinerator.

What's not being said by Dr Ciantar is that this "synergy" between the abattoir incinerator and the Mater Dei waste treatment facility is not by design but through somebody's gross mistake when sizing the abattoir incinerator. The net result of this inexplicable error is that we are left with a grossly oversized incinerator (FOI, May 6) that has cost millions of liri, and has no material to burn. The "synergy" being referred to is nothing more than an attempt to mitigate the mess-up. Let's be honest and start calling a spade a spade.

To add insult to injury, it is reported that the abattoir incinerator will consume 1.3 million litres of biodiesel annually (April 6) which means that it will run up a fuel bill of around Lm500,000 a year. Half a million liri a year to keep a useless piece of equipment constantly running - because an incinerator is not a machine which can be simply switched on and switched off. The incinerator will swallow almost half of Malta's biodiesel production, with the result that the country will be hard pressed to meet the targets stipulated in EC Directive 2003/30/EC on the use of biofuels for transport and therefore risk yet another fine from the EU Commission.

Needless to say, the burning of all this precious fuel in the incinerator will result in the emission of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the incinerator's chimney stack - an unenviable mark of the ministry's contribution to climate change.

Rather than attempting to find "synergies" where none exist (for how can one begin to consider the import of highly infectious waste from a hospital into a food production premises?), the ministry should send the incinerator back to where it came from or to a scrap yard and start afresh. An enquiry into how and why the situation was allowed to come to this would not be out of place.

I do not blame Dr Ciantar personally for these mistakes, for I understand that he would have found these problems on his plate when taking up his new position. But I cannot understand his frustration at the population's lack of cooperation when the example to be followed simply isn't there.

For how can anybody take the government seriously on climate change and energy and water saving issues when mistakes of national proportions such as these are allowed to happen and nobody is held accountable?