Do you want to live on the doorstep of a landfill?

The chances are that unless you live in the heart of a town which is part of Malta’s ribbon of development – and hence, in such a built up area that there is no room for a landfill immediately near you! – you pretty soon will. The news, as reported in the local press last week, that landfills will only take seven years to fill up, means that anyone living near any kind of very large open spaces may soon have to face the prospect of a landfill being dug and filled up near them pretty soon.

So, is anyone else worried that Malta’s first engineered landfill in the Salina area will be filled up in only seven years? The residents in the nearby area were already very concerned about living so close to an engineered landfill, having just about survived Maghtab for all these years. We were initially told it would take about 20 years to fill up. Even that prospect I found daunting, imagining little Malta, in just 100 years, filled up with five massive holes stuffed up with waste.

Now, if we need one every seven years, we will have a massive 14 landfills in Malta in just 100 years, assuming of course that we are even going to contain that amount of waste we produce at current levels. Apparently, only that section of the landfill which is to take the hazardous waste will take 20 years to fill up, so our environmental policy clearly needs reviewing.

It is really short-sighted of us not to be considering the safest forms of incineration as part of our waste management and disposal policy. It is so obvious that such a small, overpopulated island that depends on around a million visitors a year to survive, cannot be digging holes the size they are at Salina every seven years.

The European country which is most paranoid and proud of its environmental conscience – Switzerland – for example, uses incinerators very extensively, and they are found outside the major cities or large conurbations.

Now, of course, the Swiss do things properly, thoroughly and methodically. They do not just have incinerators outside every major city. There are clear systems in place to make people reduce waste, not least the hugely expensive refuse bags for rubbish, as well as very organised systems of separating waste and encouraging consumers to buy products which are less environmentally costly.

So Switzerland – like Malta a relatively small country which depends on tourism for much of its revenue – uses incinerators widely. Why isn’t this solution being considered here? It is true that there are scary stories about incineration, but today there are incredibly clean incinerators and the technology is very advanced, but, of course, very expensive.

Do we have an alternative though? Can we really dig a landfill every seven years? Look at all the public outcry over the one near Maghtab. Can you imagine this happening every seven years as yet another area has to give itself up to be a landfill? Does it make sense for a tiny country like ours to be bulging with landfills filled with waste?

Somehow, if we are going to survive as a tourist destination, we are going to have to do much better than this. We simply cannot go on as we are – one of the most expensive destinations in Europe for other Europeans to enjoy a holiday, an island which sacrifices quality for quick profit at every opportunity, and an island that thinks short-term instead of long term.

Long-term incineration – or a form of it – is going to be inevitable. The sooner we fund it, the better, perhaps by selling off Maghtab to someone who wants to rehabilitate it, and using the proceeds – the rehabilitated land at Maghtab would be worth a fortune to any developer – to fund the more expensive but far more efficient form of waste disposal called “incineration”.

Alternatively, Malta will soon merit an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the country with the largest proportion/concentration of landfills area. I would like to see some more enviable records than that.