Tripoli drowning in trash
- Written by E.Tsiliopoulos
The city of Tripoli is drowning in rubbish. Photographs show huge piles of garbage around waste bins throughout the city. And it is not surprising given that, according to reports, in many places it has beenover a month since regular rubbish collections have taken place.
The worsening situation prompted Regional Governor of the Peloponnese, Petros Tatoulis to declare the city of Tripoli in a state of emergency yesterday, following a request from the city’s municipal council.
The move will open the way for emergency collections to take place and clear the streets of the stinking piles. But that will merely be a temporary, and most likely expensive, solution to a problem that has been years in the making, not only in Tripoli, but throughout the country.
For the fact is that, quite literally, the country’s political leadership have long proven themselves thoroughly incapable of dealing with its garbage.
The problem in Tripoli stems from the fact that the municipality, which has a population of almost 50,000, does not have its own waste treatment facilities, or even a place to temporarily store its rubbish.
Instead the city is serviced by the Attica landfill in Fyli, with Tripoli’s waste trucked over 150 kilometers to be dumped at a site that already services about 5 million people. It is a poor system and part of the reason that Greece routinely gets hit with fines from the European Union for failing to implement its waste management directives.
Tripoli produces about 50 tonnes of waste a day, and it is estimated that on the streets of Tripoli 15,000 tonnes of waste is slowly decomposing. This is also not only household waste but includes building and industrial waste.
The mayor of Tripolis, Dimitirs Pavlis, when asked why Tripoli had no better way for managing its waste told In.gr, “There are some who want to handle waste in their own way, serving specific interests. And I am referring to the State and a series of people behind it.”
The state of emergency ordered by Mr Tatoulis is due to last until the 10th of January and will allow the municipality to impose emergency measures to clear the waste from the streets and deposit it in a ‘temporary’ site before it is transferred – sometime in the future – to the Fyli or another landfill.
The Regional Governor was quoted by In.gr as saying about the measure, “In this way we will be able to authorize another contractor to solve the issue, while this fact also gives us the power to take other decisions for other loading and transfer sites and potentially proceed with the licensing of a new landfill site.”
While residents will undoubtedly breathe a sigh of relief if and when the streets are finally cleared, in all likelihood the new ‘temporary’ site to store the waste will not meet the basic requirements for waste management, threatening the water table with dangerous runoff among other potential environmental hazards.
Meanwhile it is an open question as to whether the political leadership at the local and ministerial level will ever succeed in implementing effective solutions, of which there are many. Or whether rotten politics in the halls of power will be ultimately reflected in rotting garbage choking the country’s cities.
