The plans for garbage are setting fires

The decision for the approval of environmental terms for the organic burning unit in Fili reeks of garbage burning from the side…

The ministry of the Environment recently issued the terms under which the Filis plant (700.000T capacity) will operate, adopting «the most internationally expensive choice for garbage management, that of bio-drying and the attendant thermal processing, both hazardous for our health, the economy and the environment», according to the Ecological Recycling Company, Mediterranean SOS Network, Greenpeace and WWF Hellas.

The approval by Birbili comes at a time when the fights in Keratea between residents and police are in their second month, and while the government via its minister of Internal Affairs, Giannis Ragkousis, is aiming to accelerate the peripheral design of Attica for trash management.

Yesterday, after three weeks, the programming agreement between ESDKNA and the District was signed, with which the District will be responsible for the implementation of garbage management works in Attica.

The signing was “assisted” by the decision of the Association stating that the agreement of the Committee is enough for approval. Please note that the Association has failed twice to make a decision due to the intense reactions of POE OTA workers, who had been asking that the new units should not be given out to private contractors.
 
Obstacles and reactions

In this climate of increasing activity around the garbage issue, came the news for the unit in Fili, where the technologies for bio-drying find many obstacles from local communities and ecological groups as they are thought to be of high investment and operating cost in relation to recycling, composting and the sanitary landfills, responsible for attracting hazardous gases and toxic ash, as well as for committing OTA to a large production of waste at the expense of recycling.

At the bio-drying units there is mechanical treatment of mixed waste, which is converted into combustible material, SRF, which is then taken to thermal treatment in special burning, cracking or gasification units. So we are talking about two separate units that will explode the cost of waste management to 80-120 euros per ton. As experts from the waste market observe, we would decrease the cost to 80 euros if we had chosen burning directly after recycling.
 
Bio-drying = burning

As the Greens-Ecologists point out, bio-drying requires a combustion unit to burn the SRF, but this is included in tiny print in the environmental survey for the plant in Fili. It is estimated that with the bio-drying of 700.000t of mixed waste, 140.000 will be taken to Fili for burial and the SRF will be 385.000 t/y. It is estimated that its combustion will lead to the production of ash that will also have to be buried in an area for hazardous waste.

The government, with the recent law for RES, gives the financing opportunity to mixed-garbage or SRF combustion units to produce electricity from bio-drying, but without determining the fraction of energy that is subsidized as well as pricing issues and the absorption of the produced energy. RAE has already approved a similar unit of 100 MW in Volos, by ENGAL, a transformation of an older Cretan company.