The Church’s environment commission appealed to politicians to adopt a more mature policy which puts the country’s common good as a priority. Certain speeches on the broadcasting media and even in parliament do not augur well, being characterised by personal attacks and attempts to make political gain, it said.

The commission made its comments in concluding its opinion on two documents published for consultation, one relating to the management of solid waste, the other about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The first revision of the strategy for waste management was published in January. The commission said the revision made sensible proposals in many areas but some parts of it are not as consistent in reasoning and justification, especially where waste incineration is concerned.

The original strategy in waste management was to prioritise practices which reduce the creation of waste. To a certain extent, the revision does so but various areas of the document create doubt as to how much Maltese society was ready to change its behaviour for this to become reality, the commission said.

The commission added that in 2005 it expressed the opinion that while the strategy was meticulous and serious in its proposals to reduce the generation of waste, there was little emphasis on how the cause could be dealt with. The investment was mainly on technical solutions only.

The strategy accepted that people had an important part to play but there was no indication of resources allocated to achieve this. At that time, the commission said, it had hoped this would be remedied in the strategy’s revision, but it seemed that again this factor has not been given the necessary attention.

The commission said that the administrative and staff resources of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority are precarious and probably not meeting Malta’s obligations towards the EU, and this applied especially to the environment directorate.

It was time to link the operator’s responsibility to the duties towards the public, meaning that an operator paid to ensure that a plant is working well should be held liable individually and directly for any harm to people’s health or to the environment.

The commission said the strategy revision attributed much importance to the need for the incineration of waste which is not recyclable. Maybe this method was being adopted because the strategy to reduce the creation of waste had failed. But, it added, such a choice should be made for valid reasons, not on suppositions. They also had to make sure that if incineration was adopted, they would not be creating conditions militating against efforts to reduce waste generation.

The commission said various reasons had been given for incineration, including the lack of space for more engineered landfills, the use of waste as a source of energy, and that an incinerator made Malta less dependent economically on the use of fossil fuel energy, and helped Malta achieve its aims about climate change.

Incineration, when compared with the use of fossil fuels, does not necessarily reduce climate change gas emissions. It was obvious that the best long term strategy that would be sustainable and protects the environment is somehow to reduce the creation of non-recyclable waste.