Environment, Europe, Headlines

ENVIRONMENT-SPAIN: Improving Garbage Management

Tito Drago

MADRID, Nov 6 2009 (IPS) - The 60,000 tonnes of rubbish collected daily in Spain, equivalent to 1.3 kilos per person, is being managed by more green-friendly methods of recovery and treatment.

One such measure adopted by the community (province) of Madrid is a non-fiscal tariff – a charge made for purposes other than revenue – “that we could call a green tax,” Javier Martín Fernández, a professor of financial and tax law at the Complutense University, told IPS.

The tariff is in line with the position of the government of socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which introduced a sustainable development bill to parliament in September.

Parliamentary sources told IPS that the bill is likely to pass, although opposition parties may propose certain reforms.

The government adopted the definition of sustainable development approved in 1988 by the World Commission on the Environment and Development, created by the United Nations in 1983.

The Commission defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Zapatero’s bill aims to promote competitiveness through research, development and innovation (R+D+i), with the goal of increasing the use of renewable energy by 20 percent by 2020, as well as reducing overall energy consumption by 20 percent.

Waste reduction and recycling play an important role in this strategy. In a 2008 study of 18 cities, the northeastern city of Pamplona was the most efficient at recycling, recovering 53 percent of glass, 69 percent of paper and cardboard and 28 percent of throw-away bottles and containers, and coming closest to fulfilling the National Waste Plan.

Two biogas plants that began to operate this year at the Valdemingómez refuse processing centre in Madrid are using organic waste to produce methane, which in turn is used to generate electricity or distributed for household use.

A facility for maintaining and servicing a fleet of 120 waste collecting vehicles, installed in 2004 in the Villaverde district of Madrid, features 120 square metres of solar panels providing heating and hot water.

Water used at the facility is recycled, and used for washing the garbage collection trucks, which run on compressed natural gas, cutting pollution by 80 percent compared to conventional diesel-fuelled vehicles.

Another initiative in Elche, a city in the Mediterranean coastal province of Valencia where garbage containers are being installed, is an exchange system for residents, who can deposit a full rubbish bin and collect an empty one, for their convenience.

Interest in automatic underground waste collection systems is increasing, and by the end of this year they are expected to be used in 55 areas in Spain, including neighbourhoods in the cities of Barcelona, Tarrasa, Vitoria, Burgos and Mollerusa, where they will be servicing over one million people.

Standing out among these is the system being built at Barcelona airport, which handles 35 million passengers a year.

Users of the automated system deposit their refuse into post-box style waste inlets, in the street or inside a building, which are accessible 24 hours a day. There are different waste inlets for each type of refuse (organic, paper, and so on).

Garbage is then transported at 60 kilometres per hour along underground pipes into containers at a central waste station, by strong air currents produced by fans. At the central station the air is filtered and clean air is returned to the atmosphere. The sorted waste is then sent on for recycling or further processing.

Among the advantages of this system is that refuse is not scattered around a rubbish container in the streets, and the nuisance of noisy, polluting waste collection vehicles coming by in the night-time hours is avoided.

In Majadahonda, a Madrid district where the system is already operational, Juan Barrios, a local resident, told IPS that apart from convenience and saving time, the collection system has done away with the mess of litter and rubbish spread around the old containers.

The streets here are quite empty of rubbish, in contrast to other Madrid neighbourhoods and other Spanish cities.

An important issue that still causes problems and is under further investigation is the final destination of waste, and the ultimate recycling of the separated materials.

The latest official report by the National Institute of Statistics indicated that only 10 percent of the total waste produced in Spain is sorted prior to collection. Of that proportion, one-quarter was glass, 10 percent was paper and cardboard, and the rest mixed waste.

The environmental activist group Greenpeace complained that a large part of collected refuse is wasted because sorting is done poorly or not at all, and the recovery of organic waste in particular is neglected.

The Spanish government’s National Waste Plan calls for local governments to provide one street container for glass and one for paper and cardboard for every 500 people, and one for plastic bottles and containers for every 300 people, by 2015. This is already being done in about 20 cities.

An increasingly popular trend is for people who have a yard, vegetable patch or larger plot of land to recycle their organic waste into compost, to use as fertiliser.

Meanwhile, a State Coordinating Committee against the Incineration of Refuse by Cement Plants was formed on Oct. 10.

The Committee claims that incineration is the most dangerous and unsustainable method of treating waste, because rather than eliminating, it spreads and scatters it, generating pollution and toxic emissions – a position that Greenpeace firmly supports.