Cyprus Mail 23 January 2025 - by Iole Damaskinos
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| House president Annita Demetriou addressing the union of Cypriot municipalities on Wednesday |
Launching the ‘pay as you throw’ scheme at present is unrealistic and the project must be postponed until all necessary research has been carried out – including how the collected waste is to be treated, House president Annita Demetriou said on Wednesday.
All stakeholders must be called together and the programme should be launched gradually, Demetriou said, if the public, and the project’s actual purpose, are to be served.
Demetriou made her statements to journalists after a meeting with representatives of the union of Cypriot municipalities and the union of communities, at Disy party offices.
Mayor of Latsia-Geri, Christos Pittaras brought to the forum the concerns of the municipalities, while communities’ union president Andreas Kitromilides spoke on their behalf.
“This entire plan is doomed to fail from the start,” Pittaras said, if the plan is not introduced simultaneously across all municipalities as a coherent action.
Meanwhile, Kitromilides said that while the communities’ association had supported the scheme from the start, and had held meetings in all clusters with the environment department, it had expected for the prerequisite studies to be done, prior moving ahead with implementation.
“We had said from the beginning that we would have to look at the studies, look at the problems, and see how it should be implemented,” he said.
Though the scheme is critical, it cannot be launched in its current form, Demetriou said. Doing so would fail to live up to expectations and be detrimental.
“Unfortunately, we have so far not heard [of any] holistic planning,” she said.
The only solution at present was to foist the cost of the scheme onto the public and this “cannot be accepted”, she said.
Demetriou went on to suggest a joint committee to determine exactly what the scheme, as a whole, should entail, and map out a staged roll out, rather than finding out what “ought to have been at the eleventh hour, as usual”.
Anything decided on must apply to the whole island and no municipality can be exempted, she said, otherwise “Cyprus will turn into a big rubbish dump, which was already a problem.”
The experiences of pioneering municipalities that partially introduced the scheme could be harnessed to guide a successfully launch, Demetriou added.
Moreover, the public needed to be told “what the scheme is, what [they] need to do, and how it will serve [them].”
Answers given by the executive branch were not at all satisfactory, Demetriou said and Cyprus risked being exposed [to the EU].
And even if the ‘pay-as-you-throw scheme’ was ironed out it would be impossible to implement under the shadow of the [stalled] Pentakomo waste treatment facility, she added.
The European Commission in December had sent a reasoned opinion to Cyprus for failing to apply directives over landfills and waste treatment, following up on warnings already sent as early as 2021 over three landfills.
The EU said Cyprus had failed to ensure that “waste is subject to an adequate treatment before being landfilled” and had also failed “to establish an integrated and adequate network of waste management installations”.
Cyprus was given two months to respond and take the necessary measures, failing which the Commission may refer the case to the EU Court of Justice.
