A proposal to rethink door-to-door garbage collection and transition to a different waste collection system has received the backing of the ADPD.

The Green Party said that Malta’s current system was ill-suited to modern-day realities and should be revised. Local councils are the best-placed entities to understand residents’ needs, it said, as it backed a proposal to change the system made by the Local Councils Association.

The LCA has proposed shifting to a waste collection point system which would see 13,000 such points set up across towns and villages. Residents would dump garbage at these points, where it would be collected by garbage trucks.

Local Councils Minister Jose Herrera said the government is looking into the proposal and acknowledged that alternatives to current systems are desperately needed for some areas.

Currently, Malta operates a door-to-door waste collection service whereby specific waste streams are collected on specific days, at fixed times.

The system has come in for criticism for a variety of reasons: from the bad smells and aesthetics that it leads to; to blocking pavements; to causing problems for shift workers who are unable to take garbage out at collection times.

ADPD chairperson Carmel Cacopardo said that local councils are currently bound by government and Wasteserv directives when it comes to waste collection, and said this needed to change. In this Light, the LCA proposal was a reasonable one, he said.

Switching systems would require some infrastructural changes to local roads and careful planning and investment, he said, as well as various studies and pilot projects to understand its impact in differenti settings.

Cacopardo urged the government to allocate the necessary resources to carry out such studies and pilot projects, to map a way forward.

The ADPD leader was joined by party electoral candidate Sandra Gauci, who will be running for office on districts 6 and 12.