Local authorities strongly back solution
Besides landfills, waste transfer stations are essential to improving garbage disposal in the city. For the first time, the competent authorities are seeking to include such facilities in city planning and the State is seizing what is perhaps the only opportunity to promote an integrated solution to the problem of waste management, by including WTSs in its draft bill. Giorgos Lantzourakis, president of ESDKNA, calls on local authorities to concentrate on a solution and for the State to pass the relevant laws. «In the ongoing efforts by the State, ESDKNA, and other local authority bodies to finally set in motion a solution to the problem of waste management in Attica, waste transfer stations must be included, as they are vital. «Transferring waste (held in roofed spaces, near the city, where four garbage truckloads are transferred to a large, closed container, which in turn are taken to a landfill or waste treatment facility) is necessary to improve cleanliness in the city. Savings are made on thousands of trips by garbage trucks to the landfills, resulting in better and more rational organization of regular garbage collection by local authorities. «WTSs reduce traffic problems on the roads leading to landfills, which, of necessity, lie outside the city. Atmospheric pollutants and the amount of rubbish scattered in the surrounding area are drastically reduced as are traffic jams by the hundreds of garbage trucks around and within the landfills during rush hours. «ESDKNA has submitted a program for the creation of new central and local waste transfer stations (such as that at Elaionas), which will make a decisive contribution to safe and modern waste management, especially in view of the Olympic Games. We expect, together with the new waste treatment facilities, to have WTSs established as well.»
