By: Paulo Praça, President of ESGRA’s Board
The country faces an emergency in waste management: landfills are reaching capacity, energy recovery is unable to keep pace with waste production, and a society that continues to consume more, separates little, and rejects new infrastructures. The answer requires investment, planning, and, above all, the understanding that these facilities exist solely to serve the populations—and that without them there is no environment, no public health, or sustainable future.
The national emergency in the urban waste sector is public, long foreseen and announced by its agents. The gravity of the situation arises from the combination of two main factors: landfill capacity is nearing exhaustion and the insufficient capacity for energy recovery through dedicated incineration, alongside the stagnation of recyclable waste recovery — the recycling — and the still incipient collection and recovery of bio-waste, which, in fact, should be the dominant destinations of the produced waste.
This means that, despite the investments made over the years to build the country’s infrastructure to adequately treat the waste it produces, it is necessary to continue investing. To ensure the management of waste whose production continues to grow, it is necessary to increase the capacity of the current waste treatment infrastructures.
The fact is that the population, which does not reduce consumption and, consequently, the amount of waste produced; which continues to prefer depositing the waste it produces mixed in the same bin, undermining its recycling, is the same population that, having not yet demonstrated willingness—as would be necessary—to change its perception of the importance of its role in improving overall performance, is also not available to have expanded or new facilities built in the region where it lives to accommodate the waste it produces.
This means that it is not only the capacity of the facilities that must be improved and appropriately dimensioned to the needs of the real country; it is also society’s capacity to understand that waste treatment facilities exist solely to respond to its own needs.
The purpose of waste treatment facilities is to serve the populations in proportion to the waste they produce. To that same degree, they should be located in the most suitable sites in environmental, economic, and social terms. Waste treatment facilities are, likewise, an indicator of development for each region; it is neither environmentally nor economically sustainable for waste to be moved from one place to another, unnecessarily increasing the cost of treatment and its environmental footprint.
As for the type of installations, they should equally deserve the best consideration in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and environmental performance. It is necessary, therefore, to respond as well as possible to the needs of society and to the protection of the environment — which is an integral and essential part of those same needs — to plan well, learn from mistakes, and evolve.
In the past, substantial investments were made in mechanical-biological treatment (MBT) units, as well as in selective collection, which should be reinforced. However, the expectation that those facilities, by themselves, would be sufficient to reduce landfill deposition and prevent an increase in energy recovery capacity proved unfounded. That objective was not achieved, overloading landfill use, which is no longer the way forward—not only because there is not enough capacity, but especially because, from an environmental perspective, it is far from the solution to privilege. On the contrary: it is the solution to be reduced to a minimum, more precisely to 10% of the total waste produced, by 2035.
That said, and considering that there is no time to waste, it is necessary to welcome the installation of waste treatment units with the same rationality with which any other social, commercial, or industrial infrastructures are welcomed. After all, it is precisely to accommodate the needs of public health, environmental quality, and quality of life of the populations that these facilities exist—or, simply, they would not be necessary.
