Landfill Malta!

There is little doubt that one of the most thankless, yet terribly important jobs falls upon the shoulders of whoever is responsible for determining how Malta and Gozo are to dispose of ever the increasing quantities of waste produced by an ever more affluent society.

Yet is has to be said that, if the result of untold public funds being expended on reports on waste management has only produced a decision to adopt landfills as the answer to the problem of waste disposal, then I venture to suggest that it has been money down the drain. Perhaps things will change with the recent setting up of the new government-owned company to tackle the problem and though I doubt it I wish them success.

Of one thing I am certain, heaping waste upon more waste to produce landfills of rubbish cannot be the answer in islands with the limitations of size such as Malta and Gozo.

The decision to go for landfills, engineered though they may be, and the shortlisting of Ghallies as a suitable site, is really a slap in the face for all those gullible enough to have believed government promises that the Maghtab dump will be closed by 2004.

If the truth be told, rather than closing Maghtab, if the government or the new company it has set up, choose Ghallies ta' Gewwa as the site of the next landfill, it will have taken the extraordinary and extremely unpopular decision to further expand it.

And yet, the problem is not so much whether Maghtab, Qortin, tal-Fulija and other dumps are to be closed. It is the indisputable fact that, if this policy is not abandoned for a more modern solution, then we have to come to terms with the fact that, sooner or later, we will all end up living in the vicinity of a landfill and ultimately on one monumental landfill. Landfill Malta!

But not, it seems 'Landfill Gozo'. To add insult to injury to all of us who have suffered by living in the proximity of Maghtab, it now seems that waste and rubbish produced in Gozo will be transported and shipped to Malta, probably to Ghallies for disposal there.

As hare-brained schemes go, this one must be hard to beat. Has the person responsible for this brainwave stopped to consider the cost of such an enterprise? The collection, packing, loading, road transport at both ends and sea-freight costs from Gozo to Malta alone must amount to millions of liri, not to mention the capital outlay to purchase the countless scaled containers required to mount such an exercise. And all you've done is shift mountains of rubbish from one island to another. You have not yet started to dispose of the garbage.

Bringing Gozitan garbage to Malta will only result in hastening the ruination of rural Malta. Anyway, where is the justice in burdening Malta and the Maltese with the garbage produced by our sister island? The idea, not unlike the subject it proposes to treat, is just a load of rubbish.

So what is the answer? Quite honestly, I don't really know, but I suspect there must be some compelling reason why small, pristine, successful and modern states and islands, Monte Carlo, Bahamas and Bermuda to name a few, have opted for incineration to dispose of their domestic waste.

Today's state-of-the-art incinerators produce minimal levels of emissions with virtually total elimination of dioxins, and while this may not be the most environmentally friendly way of disposing of household garbage in countries that are blessed with an abundance of land, in the case of tiny Malta it must be the lesser of the two evils: incinerate or dump into landfills.

The dumping option may work for a decade or two but, given our size, it is a very finite solution. At some time in the future, Malta will have to stop dumping its waste in the countryside and opt for a more modern way of disposing of rubbish/garbage and this may well be by incineration, which has successfully solved the problem of household waste in other countries; can it not solve our problem too?

We are then left with 80 per cent of all that ends up in Maghtab, which, one understands, is composed of building material and rubble. Surely this aspect of the overall problem can be solved by land reclamation as has so successfully and profitably been done in Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere.

Alternatively, it could be disposed of in the hundreds of disused quarries that dot both islands, ideally by reaching some form of agreement with the owners of these gaping scars in our countryside.

The landfill solution is fraught with problems mainly due to the minuscule land available on these islands and has the added disadvantage that whenever one opts to site a landfill, one can be guaranteed of earning the displeasure and ire of those unfortunate enough to live in the area.

I firmly believe that an in-depth study of the problem with an examination of the pros and cons of both dumping and incineration will show that the disadvantages of dumping far outweigh those of incineration, and conversely the advantages of incineration far outweight those of dumping.