The useful life of the El Inga landfill is less than two years.
Emgirs must expropriate a piece of land that belongs to DuraGas, a private company that warns that burying garbage in this space represents a risk to the environment and safety, due to the mixture of gases.
The useful life of the El Inga landfillwhere the 2,200 tons of garbage that Quito generates daily arrive, the months are numbered.
According to the Metropolitan Solid Waste Management Company (Emgirs), the landfill can extend its operation until 2024, as long as two actions are carried out: the construction of an emerging cell, which allows time for a new and last bucket to open in the Inga. After that, Emgirs must find another space to deposit the garbage.
Without the popup cell
Popup cell 12 doesn’t exist yet. Its construction would take four months. While the usable areas of the landfill (spaces that are opened to continue depositing garbage) would only serve until June 2023, according to Maricruz Hernandezgeneral manager of Emgirs, in an interview in December 2022.
At the moment, Hernández says that usable spaces they are a little over six months old, but the optimal thing is not to continue pressing the filling, but to have the cell that would give it “a breath”. The non-construction is tied to a legal problem with a neighboring company of the landfill: DuraGas.
Environmental hazard warning
For the new cellEmgirs plans expropriate landof three hectareswhich belongs to Duragas.
The new cell would remain, wall to wall with the packaging and storage plant of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) in the parish of Pifo, in Quito.
Carlos Alberto Cabezas, legal manager of DuraGas, points out that most of this land corresponds to the “buffer zone” that separated the Duragas plant from the El Inga sanitary landfill.
With the expropriation there is an “imminent environmental and security risk,” it indicates Cabezas, due to the mixture of gases generated by both companies: methane and liquefied gas.
Protection Action
The expropriation of the land was promoted by Emgirs in September 2022, a month later, DuraGas presented a protection action for the violation of three constitutional rights: legal certainty, property and motivation of the decisions of the public power.
The judge denied the protection action and the decision was appealed. Currently, they are awaiting the pronouncement of the Provincial Court.
Cabezas explains that the motivation to present the Protection Action is not the land, but Emgirs has not submitted environmental studies that support that there will be no dangers due to the gas shock. In fact, on July 25, 2022, the Ministry of the Environment indicated that Emgirs has not presented any technical study regarding the construction of cell number 12.
Hernández indicates that there are such studies, but that they have not presented them because they have not taken possession of the land, since they are awaiting the pronouncement of the Provincial Court (it is about two months of waiting).
For Cabezas, what Hernández said is a contradiction and warns that lots of land where the cubetos of the landfill they do not belong to Emgirs.
Hernández, affirms that the land is suitable, because before the declaration of expropriation, the environmental department of Emgirs made technical, economic and environmental studies.
It also indicates that according to the studies, the environmental impacts will be minimized in two ways: with the collection of gases generated by the disposal of solid waste that are converted into electrical energy and with the collection of leachate through pipes, to be transferred to swimming pools. storage.
Hernández calls Duragas’ statements about a risk of explosion “irresponsible” if emergency cell 12 is built. He also adds that the best thing for the city is to deposit the garbage there, while bucket 11 is being built.