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Cleanup of landfills and dumps in eastern North Macedonia has been constantly postponed for a year

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From March last year, through April and September, to the new promise for the current spring. This is the series of promises that had been given in the past year about the start of the cleanup of the non-standard municipal landfills and dumps that are polluting the waters, the soil and the air in 18 municipalities in the North Macedonia’s Eastern and Northeastern regions.

The spring arrived, but there has been no announcement by the state or municipal authorities on the start of the project that is worth around €10 million. The landfills are overloaded with waste and will have to be cleaned and their locations will have to be recultivated and fenced. The municipal public enterprises will have to conduct regular controls of the quality of underground waters, check the stability of the cover that will be set at the landfills and clean the canals for atmospheric waters.

On two occasions, on the 7th and 15th of March, Meta.mk sent a list of questions to the Ministry of Environment and Physical Planning with a request for information regarding the start of the cleansing of the illegal landfills throughout the country’s Eastern part including the recultivation of the current substandard municipal landfills. To this day, we haven’t received a reply to our questions.

The last information we received from this ministry since the start of this year, was that they are working on completing the necessary documentation since part of the locations that have to be cleaned and recultivated were inserted at all in urbanistic plans. Otherwise, last year, a Turkish and a German company were selected to start the process which will mean closing the existing municipal landfills and cleaning of the 30 illegal landfills in the Eastern and Northeastern planning region.

The accomplishment of the whole process is part of the establishment of a regional system for waste management in both regions.

With the secured assets, all 104 identified dumps in both regions will be cleaned in the forthcoming months. Parallel to the cleaning of the dumps and the recultivation of the substandard municipal landfills, it was planned to start a tender procedure for selecting a contractor that would be building a regional landfill in the village Mechkuevci, the municipality of Sveti Nikole.

But in the meantime, the new mayor of Sveti Nikole municipality, Dejan Vladev, at the start of this year, publicly announced that he is opposing the building of a regional landfill at the planned location. Complete construction documentation has been prepared for this location and a tender will have to be called for the company that will be tasked with building it.

After this announcement, on the 25th of February, the Council of the Sveti Nikole municipality, where the majority of its members are from the opposition party VMRO-DPMNE, held a session, where a decision was made for the dislocation of the regional landfill from the Mechuevci village. At the session, even SDSM’s advisors requested to hear the arguments against the building of a regional landfill at the planned location while Levica requested a mandatory referendum.

At the session, Mayor Dejan Vladev said that the referendum is a final solution if the government decides to take away the municipality’s authorizations regarding the landfill. This session was also attended by VMRO-DPMNE’s MP Blagica Lasovska.

Despite this move will hinder the building of the first modern landfill that meets EU’s standards in this country, the municipal decision will most likely have repercussions not only with the cleaning of the dumps and the closing of the municipal landfills in both planning regions but it will endanger the secured grant in the amount of 40 million EUR from the EU for the building of a regional landfill.

At the same time, the question that is posed is who will return the assets in the amount of several million EUR for the preparation of the construction documentation for the location at Mechkuevci, but also the assets for the purchase of waste collecting trucks and containers for waste selection for all municipalities in the Eastern and Northeastern planning regions.

Otherwise, the cleaning of the dumps and the recultivation of the existing municipality landfills that actually do not have an environmental working license and are polluting the environment should be undertaken in two phases. The activities that should start this spring are the first phase of the complete procedure for closing the landfills and dumps in the Eastern and the Northeastern planning regions. In the second phase that will follow in the future, all remaining locations must be closed, as with waste they are overloaded with, they endanger the soil, waters and the air in these regions.

In the Eastern region, a total of 12 substandard municipal landfills and 72 dumps were registered, while in the Northeastern region there are 6 municipal landfills and 32 illegal waste dumps. Among them, the biggest is the Krasta landfill in Kumanovo, and in the past several years, most of the municipalities complained about the burning of waste and the air pollution because of the landfills. They also complained about the soil pollution and the pollution of surface and underground waters that are used for various purposes by the population.

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