Green party (Ecologists- Greens) on Wednesday presented an alternative "Zero Waste Strategy" for coping with the capital's waste management problems and accused the government of choosing "overly expensive and ecologically unsound" solutions that pandered to the interests of financially powerful groups and were hard for local communities to accept.
According to the EcoGreens' Nikos Chrysogelos, the plan worked out by the party would be cheap, immediately effective and viable in the long-term, without requiring one or two areas to be sacrificed as "victims" or enforcement by riot police.
The proposal calls for the creation of two plants for composting pre-selected organic wastes at Keratea and Grammatikos capable of handling 600,000 tonnes of waste per year, along with a third such unit at the existing landfill site at Fylis and ten smaller composting units at municipalities.
They also called for small composting units at parks, hospitals, army camps, hotels, large supermarkets and individual households.
The plan also calls for a more far-reaching recycling and re-use programme with separate bins for paper and cardboard, other types of packaging, organic wastes and other residues as well as additional waste sorting, recycling and re-use centres.
According to the EcoGreens, adoption of their proposal in full will divert 1.1 million tonnes from the Fylis landfill in two-three years and up to 1.8 million tonnes by 2020. If this reduction is combined with programmes to process and separate the massive quantities of buried refuse at the Ano Liosia-Fylis landfill, this might postpone the need for another landfill site in Attica for several decades, they claimed.
ANA
