site.btaFailure to Close Old Landfills Presents Serious Problem

Failure to Close Old Landfills Presents Serious Problem

Sofia, June 12 (BTA) - Bulgaria is faced with a serious
challenge as it is being prosecuted by the European Court of
Justice for failure to close old landfills, Environment and
Water Minister Ivelina Vassileva said on Friday, speaking at
question time in Parliament.

Vassileva noted that waste management is a responsibility of
municipal governments, but the Environment and Water Ministry
supports them by providing funding and technical assistance.
Thirty-seven old municipal landfills are being decommissioned
and ameliorated with 97 million leva in funding from the
state-owned environmental management company PUDOOS, she said.

When the European Commission suspended environmental aid to
Bulgaria in 2013, the Environment and Water Ministry stopped
payments to the builders of regional waste management systems,
the Minister recalled. EU aid was resumed in November 2014, and
now the Environment and Water Ministry is speeding up the
process of constructing regional waste management systems.

As soon as the new regional systems go into operation, old
municipal landfills are closed down. Seven new regional systems
are already operational: two since 2012 and five since the
beginning of 2015. They have taken over the waste from 28 old
municipal landfills, Vassileva explained.

Chavdar Georgiev MP, who had raised the question with Vassileva,
reacted by saying that the process of closing and ameliorating
old landfills is obviously slow and inefficient. In one
particular case, the old landfill in the southeastern
municipality of Topolovgrad is still in use, although the waste
is supposed to be transported to the regional landfill in
Harmanli.

Vassileva answered that the company transporting waste from
Topolovgrad was inspected on April 8 but no irregularities were
detected.