Landfills ‘thing of the past,’ says Mitsotakis
Landfills are now “a thing of the past,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has said at the opening of the county’s newest waste management facility in the Peloponnese.
The facility at Paleochouni, in Arcadia, has the capacity to treat 105,000 tonnes of waste annually and will serve the regional units of Arcadia, Argolida and Corinthia. It forms part of the wider integrated waste management project in the Peloponnese that includes units in Messinia and Laconia that can manage another 95,000 tonnes per year.
“The wretched landfills, the volumes of garbage that threatened public health and altered the unique nature of this place, are now a thing of the past,” Mitsotakis said.
Not only did the new facility relieve the region of an environmental burden, “it relieves taxpayers of burdens of millions of euros resulting from the continuous fines from the European Union,” he said, adding that “it will offer clean, cheap energy, while creating new markets for recyclable materials and secondary fuel.”
“At full operation this project will supply the green energy equivalent for the needs of 6,000 households, which is double the energy that the project actually consumes. At the same time, it will lead to a reduction of 24,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere,” he said.
While Greece had only three waste management units In 2019, there are now 11 while 16 are under construction, he said, adding that the €600 million in EU funding secured for waste management projects from 2021 to 2027 will allow for the completion of the waste management network throughout Greece.
