The Peruvian former Foreign Minister, Augusto Blacker Miller, is one of
the investors in the Fier incinerator project that had the support of
the Albanian government, the Fier Prefecture and the Fier Mayor. It
spurred harsh debates at this city and there is a pending procedure at
the Municipal Council, without being approved due to the opposition of
left-winged councillors.
1) Should a waste management incinerator be built, and what foresees the local waste management plan in Fier, planned with the support of the World Bank experts?
2) Have we completed all phases required by the waste management law, which requires a divided collection of waste for recycling, composition, landfill and for profiting energy?
3) How dangerous is it and has Albania such a large quantity of wastes to burn in an incinerator, to produce energy and so that it can justify a million EUR investment?
The local waste management plan says that it is necessary to build a landfill, while on a national level we need six in total, with a capacity of 120.000 tons each year.
After the calculations made by the Fier Municipality, it would be more favourable to build a regional landfill for the wastes of this district. Fier is expected to reduce progressively the quantity of wastes through a recycling or composition procedure.
The Fier Municipality argued that they need to build an incinerator, not an implant that buries wastes, but that burns them, and that requires 10000 metric tons of urban wastes each month.
According to the Fier Municipality, they don’t need a landfill, since there are no sufficient wastes. But for the incinerator, which needs great quantities of wastes, they have argued the opposite, considering it a necessity.
The Fier Municipality project for the construction of an incinerator provides that this land will be given through concession to the Apolonia Investments Company for 20 years. The company would then invest 225 million USD for the construction and installation of the incinerator.
But the local plan for the waste management says that the building of incinerators has a higher cost for the country’s development. The process is very complex and it requires qualified personnel. Most importantly, it also requires stable financial sources, since an operation failure could pollute the environment and damage the population’s health.
In this plan it is stated clearly that in the case of the incinerator, the emissions in the air, water and soil should be deposited as dangerous materials. The company has introduced a project for burning the wastes to a 20.000 degrees Celsius temperature that according to the relation realizes the dissolution of organic molecules. But environment specialists suspect that the technology that will be used in this implant could be old and not according to the EU requests.
This study of the Fier Municipality has shown that 65% of the wastes are made of biodegradable materials, meaning that based on the EU directives on the landfills, it is required a deviation of the wastes from the landfill by focusing more on the recycling.
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