SYRACUSE – Waste emergency postponed for about two months. There is a temporary solution, in fact, for the 174 Municipalities of the provinces of Catania, Messina and Syracuse that confer in the Lentini landfill, which is close to saturation. They will be able to continue bringing waste to the Lentinese landfill. But a part of them, after being treated in the Sicula Trasporti plant, will be diverted for transfer to three Sicilian plants where the Region has found availability and space. That is: Gela, Motta Sant’Anastasia and Siculiana.
This will enable the Lentini landfill to receive only a part of the planned waste, which will be equivalent to a quota not exceeding 1200 tons per day. This quantity will allow you to postpone the dreaded saturation for a few more weeks. Until no later than mid-August, according to the calculations of the site administrators. At that point another solution will have to be found, to which the competent bodies – from the regional water and waste department to the Srr, up to the individual municipalities – are also working with some friction.
At the moment, therefore, the emergency is postponed. There will be no piles of rubbish on the street. The Lentini landfill, the largest in Sicily, in which they give waste from all the municipalities of the three provinces of eastern Sicily plus some municipalities in western Sicily (these, now, diverted to the Trapani area), has managed to postpone its saturation. According to initial calculations, it would be full by the end of April. Then a mechanism was set in motion that inevitably involved the Region, to avoid the emergency. The judicial administrators who are currently in charge of the plant, first verified the possibility of obtaining space by suspending transfer contracts with “third parties”. By gradually carrying out “altimetric surveys” on the tank being filled, at the end of which they found that they could guarantee “compliance with the quotas envisaged by the authorized executive project”. This led to the extensions after the first stop date, which was announced for April 30th. The last one expired yesterday.
And now, as mentioned, the finding of space “Since we will take part of the waste to other landfills and ours will last a little longer,” explain the administrators themselves. Solution that remains temporary: «It will last – they explain – until the end of July / mid-August at the latest. At that point it will be definitively full ».
Emergency postponed, therefore. And then? The pressures of the regional water and waste department on the Srr (Society for the regulation of waste) and on the municipalities that compose them are known. In two directions, One is to increase the percentages of differentiated waste, thus decreasing the shares of unsorted waste to be sent to landfills. Pressures that have become formal warnings signed by the general manager Calogero Foti, also with references to any “civil and criminal liability”.
The other direction is that of transporting waste outside the Region. Also in this case, frictions have arisen between the SRR and the Region. The Srr, wary of seeking expression of interest, have published the notices. But they limited themselves to this. They obtained answers, but the investigation did not continue: “That process is stopped – confided Michelangelo Giansiracusa, mayor of Ferla and delegate for the Srr of Syracuse – without money and without management experience of the Municipalities in that perspective it is a ‘ useless activity “. Yet the Region has approved 45 million from the Recovery fund. Funds whose transit, overnight, in the coffers of the municipalities called to manage the transport of waste abroad, the mayors see very unlikely.
Land clutch brought the Srr of Catania, Messina, Syracuse and Ragusa (the entire area of eastern Sicily) to set up a technical table to produce solutions on their own, rather than undergo them from Palermo. In mid-August everyone must have clearer ideas. On that date Lentini will really close.