Recycling used cars

The Prime Minister declared that all licensed graveyards should be situated 5 km from national and regional roads. After this declaration, the government left this matter in silence for more than one year.

On 7 September 2011, the government quickly issued a normative act for urgently removing all vehicle parts. The only difference this time was the distance, from 5 km to 1 km.

One week later, Prime Minister Sali Berisha received the representatives of the German “Scholz” Company headed by Rafael Bart, the executive of this company, which has built a powerful plant for recycling scrap metal and used cars. Two weeks later, the government passed the law in Parliament, the initial version of which was prepared since 2010.

This law opens way to the import of old vehicles and their recycling in Albania, a process that was strongly opposed by the opposition, which had suspicions after seeing the capacity of this plant in Xhafezotaj. This activity was registered as an Albanian business in 2008.

The construction of this giant plant started right away, and when it was finally built, on March 2011, Scholz secured the environment license from the Ministry of Environment. Top-Channel has secured a copy of this license, in which it is said that the capacity of this plant is 800 tons of scrap metal per hour. The relation of this law says that the total stock in Albania is 120.000 ton of scrap metal deriving from old cars.

Even if this plant would work for five hours a day, with this capacity it would recycle the entire Albanian scrap metal for only one month. Albania creates 6000 tons of scrap metal per year from used cars. This means that Scholz will need other sources its raw material, which the opposition suspects that will be imported in Albania with the law that the government allowed only a few days before.

Another shadows of doubt derive from the fact that according to the Albanian law, the recycling activity also requires a specific license, besides that of the environment, and which in the technical language is called License 32B. Credible sources from this institution said for Top Channel that the company has not received this license, although the activity has started in Xhafzotaj. For the opposition, this is a clear example when the law follows a business for specific interests.

Top Channel