200,000 euros per day for Italy! For us?

Peloponnisos is full of arbitrary landfills, Athens suffers from the removal of contracted employees and the break-up of A.C.M.A.R.

While the stench in the capital is becoming unbearable and the bins have overflown due to the removal of 100 contracted employees from the Fylis Landfill , the garbage situation, mainly in Attica and Peloponnisos is getting out of hand .

The second recent referral of the European Commission against Italy for two working landfills and the proposal for a heavy fine in the European Court should make us think: 200,000 euros a day if Italy conforms and 21,400 for the time between the first and the second conviction.  

The Greek State already has the 2nd notice from Brussels in its hands for not complying with the decision of the European Court from 2005, but the situation is bound to get worse with the delays caused by Kallikrates.

A.C.M.A.R. the body responsible for the garbage of Attica, is failing and the successor will not be ready before the next six months according to the optimistic scenario.

The worst problem, according to members of the M.E.E.C.C,. is that there are no alternatives to dispose of the garbage and as an example they cite the prefecture of Peloponnisos, which doesn’t have even a single landfill.

«If we close the dumps where will all the trash go?» they wonder, and they don’t conceal their fears about the situation in Italy being very similar to ours. Also, they don’t exclude the possibility of a second recourse against Greece, with a similar price as «the Committee does not look at how many dumps are open, but at the breach of EU legislation».

Greece is called upon to answer to the recent letter from the commission by December 28th, and present the current situation with the Areas of Uncontrollable Garbage Disposal (AUGD), which is not the least bit encouraging despite the fact that in the last two years more than 3,000 dumps have been closed.

The interministerial committee, under Theodoros Pagalos, have dealt with the unsolvable problem of the “3rd world” dumps, without a magical solution for their disappearance in sight. It is calculated that approximately 250-300 dumps are still operational all over the country.
 
Ancient ruins found in Grammatiko

At this moment, excluding the landfill at Grammatiko where progress is made albeit slowly, the regional planning for the construction of integrated waste management factories is still on paper.  

Up to now, it is estimated that about 40% of the project has been finalised, with snail's-pace progress mainly due to delays in the expropriations for the construction of landfills and local road networks. The difficulties were compounded by recent archaeological finds which, as a decision of the Ministry of Culture states, should be moved manually (!) into a container and removed from the site.

Information from business circles indicates that there are considerations in the Government to promote more rapid integration in the fast track processes for the Filis unit, but the Ministry of Environment professes ignorance.

They even point out that compared to the projects in Keratea and Grammatiko, which are under authorized environmental conditions, Fili is falling behind, going on to add that in terms of the ministry’s open call for dump restoration, they have found only one application!