CYPRIOTS create the biggest amount of municipal waste after the Danish who however are much better at treating their waste than Cypriots, according to the latest European Union statistics from the European Union for 2009.
The Danish were the most wasteful, producing 800 kilos of waste per person. Cypriots followed suit, creating 778 kilos of waste, with Ireland and Luxembourg not too far behind. Cyprus’ second lead also marks a decline from 2008, when it came third in household wastes.
Denmark however greatly surpasses Cyprus when it comes to treating its waste.
The Danish incinerate almost half of their municipal waste and recycle about a third.
Cyprus on the other hand was not making compost or incinerating waste at all in 2009.
Furthermore, only 14 per cent of our waste was recycled.
“The average Cypriot still does not understand how important it is to recycle,” Environment Commissioner, Charalambos Theopemptou, said yesterday after the results had been released.
He said recycling was a necessity in Cyprus for two reasons.
The first is the lack of refuse space. “We’ve polluted the whole of Cyprus. There’s no more space left to deposit our rubbish,” Theopemptou said. There are 114 large refuse deposit spots and about 800 smaller ones in the whole of Cyprus.
The second reason is the climatic changes that Cyprus is undergoing and is especially vulnerable to. “The energy required to recycle is much smaller than that of building something from scratch,” Theopemptou said.
This means that our current waste treatment policy creates even more rubbish in a roundabout way. Theopemptou used an analogy of starting a mining process to get the necessary metals to build a soft drink can from scratch instead of recycling it, which would be simpler, more straight-forward and leave less rubbish behind.
“Cyprus did not have a recycling policy before its EU admission in 2004 and we’re actually meeting the requirements which Cyprus, as a country new to recycling, should be meeting,” Theopemptou added nonetheless.
An example of progress is the 2010 construction of a waste disposal unit in Koshi, near Larnaca, as part of measures to end uncontrolled rubbish dumping. Its facilities include recycling, waste sorting and organic refuse composting.
But for Cyprus, there is still a lot of catching up to be done. In Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden half or more of waste treatment consisted of recycling and composting. Germany leads the EU-27 by recycling 48 per cent of its waste.
In Bulgaria, 100 per cent of waste ended up in a landfill; this is a treatment method favoured also by Romania (99 per cent), Malta (96 per cent), Lithuania (95 per cent) and Latvia (92 per cent). But these countries produce only half the waste per head that Cypriots do.
