Malta is still green with regard to environmental matters. The country’s track record so far is certainly not one to be held up as an example. However, we are not the only ones. Israel, Spain and Italy, to mention just a few countries, all grapple with their environmental problems, especially those regarding waste management.

Barring the discovery of some seriously contradictory statement tucked away in the mammoth report, or founded criticism by qualified experts, the findings of the much-anticipated Scott Wilson report, made public last week, are, generally speaking, good news.

The impact of the Maghtab, Qortin and Wied Fulija landfills on the environment is less than had been expected. Some people had even speculated about the presence of carcinogenic levels of dioxins emissions at Maghtab.

Scott Wilson research manager Barry Gore explained that the levels of dioxins detected in the soil immediately adjacent to the Maghtab landfill stand well below any alarming level. The reading for dioxins around Maghtab is well below the EU average.

The adjacent marine environment does not seem to be suffering from any pollution crisis either. The level of dioxins found on the seabed is more likely to be caused by emissions from traffic on the nearby coast road than those from the landfill.

Caution is always advisable, especially given that the report has just been published and because, in Mr Gore’s own words, the research is ongoing, especially in connection with leachate levels – toxic fluids that gather at the bottom of landfills and contaminate the ground beneath. Yet, it seems quite reasonable to conclude that the situation is manageable.

The report also includes a series of suggestions on how to go about rehabilitating the dumps. The strategy chosen rests on a three-phase process. The first phase deals with reinforcing the sites, the second phase with extracting the gases from the sites which, at the moment, are contributing to making them unstable, and the third phase with the levelling and landscaping of the mounds, planting them with trees and eventually converting them into some sort of park. The plan has been tried and tested elsewhere, such as in Israel.

At last, the country has a serious plan for treating its landfills. Furthermore, the plan dealing with the

rehabilitation of the landfills is complemented by a wider environmental strategy which, on the one hand, will see to the reduction of the waste stream being dumped in the engineered landfills and on the other will properly treat waste which can be recycled.

The plans announced so far focus on the increase of bring-in sites from the present 50 to 400 across Malta and Gozo. This is a move which presumably is to be complemented with a wide waste separation at source programme. The treatment of recyclable material will be left to plants such as the one in Marsascala.

Everything sounds very nice on paper but we will have to see it in practice to judge the effectiveness of the plan. Nonetheless, in spite of the fact that the situation may seem encouraging, over the past few months a serious fissure has been slowly but surely growing between the political parties, all three of them, and the local environmentalist community.

The situation is still hard to decipher properly. One will have to see how it all pans out in the coming months, but if the divide keeps growing, and the environment, like many other topics, becomes another partisan-politics subject, then Malta will have “another Maghtab” to tackle, perhaps more toxic than the one the country has at the moment.

There are no easy solutions to this problem. A lot has been said and done over the past months to create an unhealthy animosity.

As usual in such circumstances, it is commonsense that must prevail.