This year, the Skopje landfill Drisla will receive an autoclave, or a machine for treatment of the medical waste, but also an air quality measurement station. The landfill received €800,000 in an IPA project for the recycling of construction waste. But the projects for secondary waste selection, treatment of industrial waste and the waste sorting and packaging plant, which are of extreme importance in the prevention of climate change and decreasing the pollution in North Macedonia, will most likely wait for some time.
On three occasions from the end of August, Meta.mk has sent questions both to the City of Skopje and the Public entreprise (PE) “Drisla”, asking when the plants for secondary waste selection and its further recycling would be installed. We haven’t received the answers at the time of the publishing of this article.
According to the official data published by the Public Procurement Bureau of North Macedonia, at the moment the facility where the autoclave, the laboratory and the rooms where the medical waste will be treated, is nearing completion. The new way of treating this dangerous waste will include a process of thermal sterilization, and the waste will no longer be burnt in the incinerator, but instead it will be deposited as the other non-hazardous waste. This investment which was concluded through two agreements by P.Е. Drisla and was published by the Public Procurement Bureau, costs around half a million euros.
Тhis year, P.E. Drisla purchased an air quality measurement station which will measure the air pollution on this location in Skopje. The project is worth around €100,000 according to the agreement published by the Public Procurement Bureau, and with it, the citizens will be able to monitor the air quality at the Drisla landfill.
Through the IPA project for managing construction waste that was granted this year, for the next period a stone breaker for construction waste is planned to be purchased as well as transport trucks and mechanization for sorting different types of waste. At the same time, the uncontrolled landfills of construction waste outside of Drisla landfill will be detected and monitored.
The data that published in the P.E. Drisla’s Program for Work and Development for 2021, are indicating that the quantities of waste that end up at the landfill are on the rise. In 2014, 165,546 tons of communal and other types of non-dangerous waste were deposited, last year, the total quantity of this type of deposited waste was 232,748 tons.
Even though P.E. Drisla’s announced long term activities include recycling over 70% of the waste delivered to the landfill to be recycled, and with it decreasing the quantities of deposited waste, to reacht that goal it is necessary to introduce primary waste selection in the households and the companies. According to data from P.E. Komunalna higiena (Communal Hygiene), in 2020 over 483.4 tons of communal waste was selected i.e. only 0.3 % of the total collected waste in the capital. Otherwise, P.E. Communal Hygiene is the main user of the Drisla landfill.
