The importer of the first shipment of Italian garbage due to be buried in a Portuguese landfill site near Setúbal is owned by a former member of the Passos Coelho Government.
For the former Secretary of State for the Environment, Dr Pedro Afonso de Paulo, the wait is over as his company has been shown to have imported not domestic household rubbish, but a mixture of detritus that is too toxic to be buried and must be incinerated.
The Government has quarantined the first shipment of many from the Italians while analysis was carried out to see what was going to be dumped at the landfill site.
Random sampling of the first 2,700 tonnes of Italian waste, in a contract worth €1 million, showed unacceptable levels of ‘dissolved organic carbon’ which could leach into water systems and bond with trace metals, creating water-soluble complexes.
The General Inspection of the Environment has now given the industrial waste treatment plant run by Centro Integrado de Tratamento de Resíduos Industriais, SA (CITRI) five days to respond to the analysis of its rubbish.
If the second analysis confirms the same suspicions, the waste will have to be returned to Italy or will have to be transferred to another treatment centre capable of handling this category of waste and licensed to do so.
Ironically, the Portuguese company that imported the Italian waste belongs to the former Secretary of State for the Environment whose company CITRI risks a fine up to €216,000 if it knew the contents of the shipment.
CITRI earlier had claimed that everything was fine and that EU rules had been followed despite no analysis of the rubbish being provided by the Italian exporter in Naples, a municipality where the rubbish collection and disposal business is known to be controlled by the local mafia.
Dr Pedro Afonso de Paulo also sits on the council of AEPSA, the Association of Portuguese Environmental Companies.
Portugal’s environmental organisation, ZERO, calls for absolute transparency, rigour and rationality on the part of the companies and government bodies involved and states that the imported waste from Italy meets, so far, all the legal requirements.
After the waste analysis, ZERO does not understand the doubts raised by the Ministry of Environment on the categorisation of the waste samples with high values of dissolved organic carbon.
Zero stated that the results of the analysis carried out on the waste samples by the Inspector General for the Environment (IGMP) were the same as the values obtained in Italy which were recognised by the Ministry of the Environment when it authorised the shipment.
The environmental organisation wants a screening process for the Italian waste, and other such shipments, so as to separate materials such as plastic, metals and organic matter.
The Ministry of the Environment could insist on this requirement as it is in line with government and EU policy to minimise the burning of waste or dumping it in landfill sites.
In an evaluation of waste imports in 2015, more than 80,000 tons of urban rubbish was sent for burning in cement plants before any recyclable materials could be removed.
ZERO wants this to cease and that a type of this type of waste is no longer authorised for landfill, incineration or use by industry without first separating the recyclable materials.
Plastic recycling is one of the main waste management operations that can contribute to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and is far better than burning it, according to ZERO.
We now await CITRI's reponse to the General Inspection of the Environment's report on ‘dissolved organic carbon’ levels.
See also 'Imported Italian rubbish held in quarantine'
Pedro Afonso de Paulo, Former Secretary of State for the Environment, (June 2011 – February 2013)
Comments
It is inexplicable.