Municipalities and Government aligned in their concern about delays in waste targets

The National Association of Municipalities stated this Tuesday that local authorities and the Government are aligned regarding the need for councils to meet waste treatment targets, estimating that proposals will soon be presented to overcome the lack of funding.

After a meeting between the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP) and the Secretary of State for the Environment, the president of ANMP, Luísa Salgueiro, told Lusa that the municipalities intended to report to the Government on the results of a meeting held at the end of January, which analysed the problems surrounding waste management.

The mayor highlighted that “there is great alignment” and a “very close” vision between municipalities and the Government regarding the needs of councils to be able to meet the recycling and waste treatment targets established in the urban waste action plans.

“Of course there is a central theme that has to do with financing needs,” he said.

Luísa Salgueiro highlighted that, currently, within the scope of PT 2030, only 400 million euros of investment are planned , “while it is true that, at the very least, the sector’s needs amount to 3.7 billion”.

“This is a topic that the Secretary of State also considers a priority. The information we have is that he is working towards presenting a proposal,” he added.

Taking out a loan “with state guarantees” from the European Investment Bank (EIB) could be a way of obtaining the necessary funds for this sector.

“The possibility is that there will be fixed energy tariffs to reinforce this guarantee and that is what the Secretary of State tells us he is working on. And we expect that solutions can be presented soon ,” he said.

The conclusions of the working group that was set up on the subject of waste should also be presented “soon”, and which was due to present, by the end of January, an emergency plan to reduce the deposition of urban waste in landfills and achieve the targets set out in PERSU 2030.

Portugal is still far from meeting its targets for reducing the production of waste that is deposited in landfills , which are at their capacity limit.

Due to the situation, there are landfills that “will probably have their life extended by enlarging the cells or creating new cells”, a solution that “is not ideal”, but that “will have to be viewed realistically” given the urgency of the situation.

Sharing current infrastructures is also another solution that is on the table.

The European Union's targets for the reuse and recycling of urban waste are 55% by 2025 and 65% by 2035 , but the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA) has released data that leaves Portugal far from these targets.

At the ANMP meeting on waste, the president of APA, José Pimenta Machado, stated that the country is in a “state of emergency” because national landfills are currently at only 14% capacity, while 59% of the waste produced still ends up in these infrastructures.

Pimenta Machado also revealed that, of the 35 landfills, only 13 have a capacity above 20% and in some of them the “capacity is below two digits”.

Due to the delay in meeting the targets, at the end of November the Government created the Waste Working Group to find solutions that help reduce the deposition of urban waste in landfills, presenting an emergency plan “that addresses the foreseeable depletion of landfills in the coming years and, in the medium term, to identify situations relating to expansions and/or creation of new waste treatment infrastructures”.