Labour leader Alfred Sant took the media to Albert Town yesterday and showed them what he claimed was an illegal waste transfer facility staffed by illegal immigrants and WasteServ workers.

He said no permit had been issued by MEPA and there had been no consultation with the Marsa local council.

The site, which he showed to the media, is in the middle of Albert Town and is a sorry picture of total neglect with rats, rubbish, skips and mud all over the place.

Work on this site had begun some two months ago. It is scandalous, Dr Sant said, that WasteServ began to use this site without ensuring that European standards on the environment were met, which is what the people have come to expect.

Dr Sant claimed that the waste tackled on that site was primarily organic waste, which used to be separated at the Sant’Antnin plant in Marsascala.

In its reply, WasteServ admitted most of Dr Sant’s claims but gave a different interpretation.

The Albert Town site is where the separated waste from the various bring-in sites comes besides that from the civic amenity sites.

This rubbish – plastic, glass, metal, paper and even batteries, computers and furniture – used to be taken to the Sant’Antnin facility to be separated by hand to ensure that the different waste are not mixed up. Following the separation, the waste is then taken to private companies for recycling.

But until the upgrading of the Sant’Antnin waste facility, which will cost some EUR23 million, is completed, and the work done by automatic means, another site had to be used, WasteServ explained.

The government gave WasteServ an area in the Marsa Shipbuilding site to do waste separation there.

WasteServ seemed to have nothing to say about the very primitive conditions of the site except to say that this proves the need for the modernisation of the Sant’Antnin facility. It also proves, WasteServ continued, that it is not true that all separated waste gets mixed up together once again, as the four Labour-led local councils who are still resisting bring-in sites keep saying.

As regards the illegal immigrants, WasteServ said it had asked the Church’s emigrants commission to provide people on a temporary basis to help WasteServ people sort the rubbish in order to keep up with the ever increasing flow of rubbish.