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Irfan the fraudster does not pay journalists' salaries

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What will we do with the garbage?

2023-08-15 14:05:00, Aktualitet CNA

The incinerator scandal has left Albania with a government discredited as corrupt or unable to spot corruption on a large scale. This is only the tip of the problem. While the government is untrustworthy, its ability to convince citizens of the need to protect the environment has gone awry, while the country has turned into a huge garbage dump.

The incinerator scandal has cost Albanians more than 150 million euros to date, but this is not the only problem. Now that the government's garbage scheme has failed, the country is left without a sensible integrated waste management strategy, at a time when there is an imperative need to protect the environment, not just as something good for healthy living for oneself. ours, but also as something necessary to have better business in the tourism sector.

First is the obvious problem: trash everywhere. The sides of the highways are turning more and more into garbage dumps, a kind of epidemic of irresponsibility of the citizens, but which seems to be also a consequence of the general delegitimization of the government. While the Minister of Tourism showed a video where a car, a policeman and a trash can were found within the frame of a camera, the fact is that in a country where citizens have been robbed of around 100 million euros just from the concession of the Tirana garbage field, no politician in power has the credibility to make citizens moral. Of course, while police moralizing isn't automatically bad, a more practical thing is worth doing: seeing to it that litter strewn along national roads is removed, so that the passers-by do not become aware of it and it does not become normal for them to throw garbage from the car. This of course requires more than a camera that shoots film.

The second problem is systemic: a large part of the country does not have a collection system, let alone a differentiated collection, and there are not even enough landfills, there are no pre-sorting points near large cities, while the corrupt system of incinerators has created expensive filing fees for many small, poor municipalities. In short, the second problem has to do with governance, or government corruption in waste management. For five years in a row, everything in the waste sector has been done to serve the monopoly of businessmen now on the run, and their clientele among politicians. The fact is that the corrupt adventure with incinerators has pushed the problem of waste management five years back and not five years ago.

Another obvious side of the government's fundamental failure is the Divjaka incident, where a group of citizens protested against the mayor, Josif Gorrea, a socialist, not to dump the garbage. (The mayor's response: "You are a whore," is worth noting alongside the baseball bat beating of citizens from the Rraja tribe and the court-ordered protection order for the Kaçi family by the guard as a new level of voters' relationship with voters). According to Gorrea, the problem is that Fieri's incinerator "hasn't worked for several days". Dumping garbage outside the designated disposal sites is of course a violation and normally, the government should have fined Gorrea for this violation, while the prosecution should normally have launched investigations for the criminal offense of pollution.

Now naturally the government must answer some key questions, which also means admitting the failure of the pyramid scheme of waste concessions. In Vlora, the waste field catches fire and the landfill project has stalled. In Fier county, the incinerator project has failed and the area needs a new solution, in the form of recycling and landfill plants. In Elbasan and the surrounding municipalities, the situation is the same. In Berat as well. The assumption that Durrësi, Shijaku, Kavaja, Kruja and Fushë-Kruja will pour their garbage into the Tirana landfill, without subjecting it to any preliminary selection in the respective city, obviously causes unnecessary pollution and unreasonable transport costs.

In the end, the solution consists in the principles of the European Union, of those principles that the government blew up with the pyramid scheme of concessions, which are: limiting the production of waste, separation at the source, recycling, landfilling, and in the end at all, if these previous methods fail to solve the problem, incineration. It's just that citizens have every right to doubt that a government caught in such massive corruption will be able to do anything to solve the waste problem, barring videos of cops and trash cans and luxury cars ./ Reporter.al