TIRANA, March 29 / ATA / – At the presentation of national solid waste management strategy and action plan, Minister of Tourism and Environment Blendi Klosi announced that his institution has launched concrete actions in the run-up to this important strategy.
Two draft decisions on banning production of non-bio degradable plastic bags and unification of fee payment for management of urban waste have been completed and are to be approved by the Council of Ministers any time soon.
Minister Klosi stressed that as part of concrete actions , we have taken two steps such as: identification of hotspots countrywide as well as review of environmental criteria on landfills or disposal sites in a bid to bring them up to the standards.
Identification of disposal sites and collection of detailed data, their classification for concrete intervention is an initiative of the ministry, which is to become a reality in collaboration with the prefects of the country and with the support of Swiss and German agencies.
One of the concrete measures brought to attention as part of this strategy is the launch of a broad-scale operation “Let us clean the Earth we want” on April 16-22.
Minister of Tourism and Environment appealed for support of all partners in this national action to clean up the rivers and coastline for a cleaner environment with the approach of this tourist season.
The strategy will be like the previous ones unless it is put into concrete actions, which we have begun to take. To date the environment ministry in conjunction with the prefects has worked to draw a real mapping of urban disposal sites. Out of 300 big and small disposal sites the strategy has found that very few of them are up to environmental standards .
As written into the strategy, we have taken the decision in cooperation with the experts to reassess the environmental criteria for urban disposal sites. The matter of the fact is that we continue striving for large landfills or incinerators and unfortunately forget about the disposal sites in the villages and small municipalities, Klosi said.
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