Macedonian citizens are continuing with the creation of enormous quantities of communal waste, that municipality communal enterprises aren’t able to collect and transfer to the landfills. In 2020, the total collected communal waste was 913 033 tons, show the data provided by the State Statistical Office. Compared to 2019, we have created 1% less waste, but far more waste compared to previous years.
Last year every citizen of North Macedonia created 452 kg of waste on average, which is by 4 kg less compared to the quantity in 2019 and was a record level during the period from 2009 until today i.e. since the time when the statisticians began evidencing the created communal waste.
In 2020, a decrease was noticed in the quantity of collected communal waste by 0.4% compared to 2019. Last year, 630, 086 tons of communal waste were collected. This means that almost one-third of created waste by people wasn’t collected by municipality communal enterprises throughout the country i.e. it is unknown where over 280 000 tons of communal waste have ended.
In regard to the collected communal waste, 522 954 tons or 83% are collected from households and the remaining 17% are produced by legal entities and physical persons as commercial waste. At the same time, 99.8% of the collected waste is discharged at landfills. Meta.mk had already written that Skopje is the only unit of local authorities that is discharging waste according to European standards for which it has an integrated license by the Ministry of Environment and Physical Planning.
According to the types of waste that were collected last year, 525 745 tons or 83.4 % is mixed communal waste that wasn’t selected in the households and companies or wasn’t submitted to a secondary selection by the public communal enterprises and as such it ends discharged in the landfills.
Meta.mk has been writing for the past few months that in North Macedonia there isn’t a single region where a modern system for waste management was implemented by building regional landfills, for which each year we are criticized by the European Commission. At the same time, the number of municipalities where significant quantities of communal waste is a rare occurrence, including the capital and its surroundings, that by far are creating the biggest quantities of communal waste in the country, but a minimal selection is still conducted.
