Paphos Life

Unable so far to find takers for the by-products generated at the municipal waste treatment plant at Pentakomo, the government has resorted to a temporary fix, allowing the by-products to be buried in a basin near the facility.

The irony is that the whole purpose of building a mechanical biological treatment plant, like the one in Pentakomo, was to end the practice of burying solid waste.

Pentakomo’s plant – operated by a partnership of Medcon and db Technologies – serves the entire Limassol district, which previously disposed of its municipal waste at a landfill in Vati.

The facility is currently generating a waste treatment by-product that is a mix of Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF) with Refuse-Derived Fuel (RDF).

SRF is essentially mud that has been dried, while RDF – also in solid form – consists mostly of processed plastic bags and fabrics.

The mixture is currently being stored/buried in a nearby basin since the facility began operating in November last year.

Read the article and chat about it below...

If only the government had done what many other countries did in the early 2000s, we would have no waste problem now. This was to build a couple of waste-to-energy plants. These would have provided 9% of our energy needs 24/7, virtually free electricity from your rubbish bags, leaving a small amount of clean and sterile clinker for roads. There are now about 500 such plants in Europe, some even in city centres. I give a detailed analysis of the technology in my book, illustrated by a Swiss plant. Why this was not done here, with the EU paying for most of the costs, is beyond my imagination.

For the anecdote, both Sweden and Switzerland are importing household waste from other countries to provide fuel for the plants and to help the other countries meet their EU obligations on waste treatment. It would be too costly for Cyprus to export its waste to provide more free electricity for the countries that had the forethought to build waste-to-energy plants!