VARAM offers to stack waste in larger piles

If Latvia moves from ten smaller waste piles to five larger ones, then the total amount of waste generated will decrease and the Council of Europe, the Commission and Parliament will be happy. The Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development (VARAM) makes such an offer. In contrast, large cities take the opposite view: excessive centralization and restrictions on the operation of certain landfills will lead to an increase in waste collection tariffs. And in that case, the amount of waste will not decrease, but illegal management will increase - in bushes, yards and other people’s containers.

Waste management is a lucrative business, because the amount of goods in it is virtually inexhaustible, but the state, local governments and citizens are obliged to pay so that the waste is not dumped in the forest or buried in pits, but intelligently managed. There is an opinion that this is not what is happening. That there is too much waste and that it is not collected intelligently. This impression is facilitated by piles of garbage, which automatically form around containers in the courtyards of apartment buildings. They practically attract filth, animals and homeless people, although formally they provide the population with intelligent waste management options.

Unintelligent management

For example, we can mention what waste sorting looks like this week in Teika, in a courtyard of an apartment building between Brīvības and Ropažu streets. There is a container for glass, a container for cardboard, two containers for unsorted waste. There is no canopy. The lids are always open to everyone, because in principle everyone has the same stuff. This week’s newest additions - a bunch of tires, a couple of refrigerators, remains of a TV, book piles and a toilet bowl. All this is covered with household waste, which lacked space in containers, and there is also a large pile of construction debris next to it. Some apartment must have gotten a new owner again. All this waste micro-world is being gutted by birds and the homeless. By the way, they use the toilet bowl in the middle of the courtyard exactly what it is intended for. The morning efforts of the janitor to give this essentially legal waste dump a more compact shape have suffered an obvious fiasco in the evening. However, it cannot be denied that waste is not only carried and brought here, but also taken away. And in that sense, the waste management, although obviously not intelligent, is still working. Outside Riga, the situation is significantly better in other cities, as these cities as a whole have been much better cared for in the last decade. That is why the intention of the Ministry of the Environment to close, transform or somehow specialize some landfills has caused concern.

No other city wants to be as dirty and polluted as Riga in the example described above. However, the plans of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development may lead to similar consequences.

Happiness lies in centralization

These intentions are described in the informative report “On the Development of Municipal Waste Management Regions in Latvia after 2020”, which is currently being referred to the government for consideration. The main idea is to create five waste management regions, in which Latvia is divided, out of the current 10, with one landfill in each. Five piles instead of 10. Accordingly, the following landfills are potentially to be closed or restructured:

• in Latgale region - Dziļā vāda, Križevņiki;
• In Central Latvia - Brakšķi;
• in Vidzeme - Kaudzītes;
• In North Kurzeme - Pentuļi.

As the ministry explains, "successful achievement of waste management goals requires centralization of the waste management system, thus ensuring a larger amount of waste to be managed in one place, which creates an opportunity to invest more effectively in technologies needed to increase waste recycling".

Waste nucleus plan

The opinion of local governments on the centralization of waste planned by the Ministry has been compiled by the Latvian Association of Large Cities, as cities are the largest supplier of waste management:

“It can be agreed that Latvia will be able to meet the targets for waste management by 2035 more effectively if their collection and recycling facilities are not too fragmented and landfills are connected to large enough regions, where it would pay off to make new investments. So far, everything is right. But why create a new nucleus in the center of the country and at the same time fragment its western part?"

The nucleus would be created by merging the current Zemgale waste management region with the Pieriga region and creating a monstrous region of Central Latvia.

Municipal counterarguments

Here are the counterarguments the big cities give to the VARAM offer. They have been formulated by Viktors Valainis, Executive Director of the Latvian Association of Large Cities:

“In the name of the construction of the Central Latvian waste management region VARAM is proposing to liquidate the second largest landfill in Latvia - the Brakšķi in Zemgale, which is currently only 59% full and has a projected service life of more than 14 years. In this case, the waste generated in Zemgale should be transported to Riga, to Getliņi. To a landfill that is slowly coming to an end. This is not right from a cost or sustainability point of view. It is more sensible to transform Brakšķi into a full-fledged waste management center and to develop the infrastructure for recycling separately collected waste.

The solution offered to Kurzeme does not seem logical either. Until the landfill Janvāri is filled, the estimated operation time of which is only slightly over five years, it is planned to temporarily pause the landfill Pentuļi. In our opinion, this is an uneconomic waste of resources, especially given the financial resources already invested in landfills. Considering that the operation of Pentuļi is planned for at least another 15 years, but the other two Kurzeme landfills will be full in a few years, it is more economically rational to create a common Kurzeme waste management region and for municipalities to agree on the main function of each of the three landfills.

And finally, the ill-considered closure and re-profiling of landfills raises legitimate concerns that waste collection tariffs for the residents of Kurzeme and Zemgale could increase significantly - even by a quarter. That is not acceptable."

The risk is in independent solutions

Although the population of Latvia is shrinking, the forecasts for the amount of waste are pleasing to the industry - there is a lot and there will be even more. The amount of waste to be managed in the reporting period is forecasted from 669 thousand tons in 2020, to 826 thousand tons in 2035. So, in a total of 16 years, they will be 12.6 million tons of waste.

If this waste is not recycled into electricity and heat due to some pseudo-green prejudice, it will create endless problems for the population, local governments, although it will provide endless profits for waste managers. In turn, the increase in waste collection tariffs will inevitably lead to the exacerbation of existing problems. Many people already think that it is alright to throw out an old sofa, tires or toilet in an apartment building courtyard, lug it to a nearby forest or throw it in a neighbor's paid container.

If the nearest landfill moves further as a result of the reform implemented by the VARAM, the operator will be allowed to raise the prices of waste removal services, and then illegal waste management solutions will only become more popular in society.