Pay-as-you-throw just an illusion

EU fines loom as waste management remains in chaos

Cyprus has no means whatsoever of handling its waste stream, even if its collection was to be financed, experts and municipal officers admitted this week.

Their statements come in the wake of ongoing revelations about years of inaction over the issue of waste management by successive governments, as it becomes increasingly clear that any talk of introducing a pay-as-you-throw scheme is putting the cart several miles before the horse.

The scheme, already piloted in some municipalities, was to entail selling colour-coded sorting bags to the public from which municipalities would receive revenue. The idea was intended to promote sorting (and payment) at source, thus reducing the massive amounts of waste currently being buried in landfills, or dumped randomly around the island.

“There is no existing infrastructure in the country for managing organic waste,” head of the House environment committee Charalambos Theopemptou told the Cyprus Mail.

“Currently households pay €180-€200 per year for waste management and the motivation should be that if you sort your waste, you will only pay for what remains after sorting. So logically, any proposed pay-as-you-throw fee ought to be lower than this amount, which is not looking feasible at present,” Theopemptou said.

Agriculture Minister Maria Panayiotou told a House committee meeting earlier this month that the special issue rubbish bags will cost each consumer between €150 and €250 per year and conceded that the figure is “higher than what each household currently pays” for waste management, although it does include both the fee payable to municipalities for waste collection and the cost of the special issue rubbish bags.

“The experts at the environment department estimate that this is the initial cost that there will be until people start properly sorting their rubbish at source,” she said.

But cost to consumers aside, the news this week made clear that pay-as-you-throw remains a long way off.

The Greens MP said he was discussing what progress had been made on the scheme with each municipality in an effort to “get a clear picture and correct data” about what had been done or left undone, locality-by-locality to present exact findings to parliament.

“We have had six years [since 2018 when EU discussions on circular waste management began] to solve all the problems and make the system functional,” Theopemptou said, but none of the necessary groundwork has been done.

Many communities lack even a basic foundation for recycling, let alone organics collection. They also lack the most basic equipment, such as sorting bins and locations, and specialised well-serviced garbage trucks.

“Green Dot [which operates the vast majority of the island’s recycling schemes] is currently contracted to only service municipalities,” head of the union of communities Andreas Kitromilides explained. This leaves communities outside the agreement and individually burdened with the cost of recycling.

“In my community, for example, we had to pay Green Dot €2.60 per resident for a door-to-door recycling service on our own initiative,” which is not a just system, he added.

Villages had resorted to seeking support from the environment department, which “occasionally” found a way to sponsor their endeavours, he said.

The larger facts of the matter are that households, communities and municipalities, will for years be saddled with payment for collection and processing of no less than four separate waste streams.

These categories are (theoretically repurpose-able) recyclables, that is paper, glass, aluminium and plastics; organics (kitchen waste and food scraps); remaining solid waste; and mixed waste – which will continue to be generated until every single person complies with sorting. None of this includes agricultural green waste, industrial waste, construction waste, liquid waste and hazardous or medical waste.

Costs for waste management have doubled in recent years, Kitromilides said. Small communities [especially in remote and rural areas] cannot finance individual arrangements with contractors or upkeep a fleet of trucks and other infrastructure necessary for the ambitious goal of total waste management.

A “roadmap” for the proposed pay-as-you-throw scheme was announced by Panayiotou on Thursday following a meeting with municipality and community unions after the news that the scheme needed to be “postponed” earlier in the week.

The so-called roadmap includes 20 sticking points which will be tackled one-by-one by a task force to be assigned to find solutions and move the project forwards.

In the interim, Cyprus will certainly be fined by the EU for failure to meet its start date of January 1, 2025 for the introduction of the scheme.

It is now abundantly clear that key infrastructure for even the initial step of creating a “green circular economy” is simply non-existent and even planning for it was not diligently carried out.

Critics of the minister’s latest announcement, among them Akel leader Stefanos Stefanou, charged that her choice of words hides the fact that the entire waste management project, for which Cyprus is accountable to the EU, is just an illusion.

Local officials had been warning the government for years that the system as it stood was an impossibility, head of the union of municipalities and Larnaca mayor Andreas Vyras said.

“To start with, neither of the two existing waste management plants, Pentakomo and Koshi, are fit to process the waste that would be generated by the pay-as-you-throw scheme,” Vyras said.

“There are only two possible units for processing organics, Koshi, [which] cannot process all the organic waste generated by Larnaca, Famagusta and Nicosia, and another private facility that charges double the fee [of the state subsidised facility].”

For Limassol, Pentakomo had been the originally intended facility, but this had become mired in scandal.

Ambitious plans to produce biogas and energy had been promoted as early as 2015 when the EU gave Cyprus over €46 million to build the mixed waste treatment facility there, that was supposed to sort, recycle, and use some of the recovered waste to make fuel.

The money had been given on the condition that the government would find buyers for the fuel, but that fuel was never sold and instead ended up buried in contravention of EU law.