It will be official decommissioned during a special ceremony to be held today.

Many might say long before time, and who can disagree; the sight of black smoke belching out of the chimney stack was enough to send shudders down anyone’s spine, more so the people who live in the harbour area.

Replacing it is a brand new dry-burning incinerator at the Marsa abattoir. Unfortunately, not many were pleased when the announcement was made that the new incinerator had been upgraded to take clinical and solvent waste, aside from abattoir waste.

Mostly, these were people from the Marsa area, who quite rightly are sick and fed up of putting up with acrid smoke which came out of the old incinerator at the same said abattoir.

Perhaps though, the authorities are guilty of not explaining, in easy terms, what the processes of the new incinerator will involve. If they had done so, they would not have had to put up with such a barrage of complaints as they received.

The new incinerator is known as a dry burning facility. This means that the whole burning process is contained and the only by-product which will be ejected into the atmosphere is one of the cleanest substances around – steam.

All waste which arrives at the incinerator compound is frozen and stored until it is its time to be burnt to ashes.

The waste is then fed into the burner which reduces it to compacted ash. This is not ejected from the stack, but it is collected from the burner itself and compacted into ash slates and disposed of in the relevant way at the Hazardous Materials Landfill in Ghallis.

The smoke that is generated from the first burn-off is then superheated again, to collect more ash. Once this is done, whatever gases are left are passed through a clay-compound netting so as to make sure that any traces of dust, dirt and ash are not ejected into the atmosphere, theoretically creating a clean burning process.

Test runs have been made, the incinerator has been inaugurated and is soon set to begin operations in earnest.

What the government has attempted to do here is kill two birds with one stone. The old smog-belching incinerators at the abattoir itself and the other at St Luke’s have both been taken out of the equation to be replaced with one versatile unit which can burn various forms of waste, leaving a much cleaner by-product.

This therefore, should have beneficial effects on the surrounding populations of Msida, Valletta, Pieta, Floriana, Marsa and the surrounding areas. Hopefully, the new incinerator will help in reducing the incidence of respiratory illnesses suffered by people in all these areas and will also remove the offensive smells which accompany incineration.

However, more must be done. The government has taken the lead in this, but there are still many other polluters that need addressing.

We have of course, got to get rid of the thousands of vehicles which still belch fumes out onto our streets and main roads.

Buses and old trucks are the main culprits and it is high time that the Malta Transport Authority looks into the derogation given to owners of old buses in this regard.

In addition, various industries need to be looked at, with perhaps penalties being imposed on those who pollute, while fiscal incentives are offered to those who cut emissions.