News | Sunday, 24 January 2010

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Even in waste separation, north-south divide prevails

James Debono
Attard and Balzan residents are the most likely to participate in the door-to-door waste separation scheme known as ‘Recycle Tuesdays’, a MaltaToday analysis of statistics presented in parliament shows.
Separated waste in Malta represents 7% of the amount of waste deposited in landfills.
The kerbside collection of specific grey bags containing waste paper, metal and plastic is organised on a weekly basis, usually but not always on Tuesdays, by each locality.
While an average 18kg of separated waste was collected from each resident in western localities between January-October 2009, only 11kg were collected from residents living in the south harbour region (Cottonera).
The difference is even more stark when individual localities are compared. In Attard, each resident on average separated 28kg of waste – in Bormla, it was 4.3kg per capita. In Gozo, 32kg of waste per capita was separated in Qala, compared to 4kg per capita in Zebbug.
The localities that separated the least waste were Valletta (6.6kg per capita), Xewjika (5.1), Isla (4.4), Bormla and Zebbug (Gozo).
Gozitans were even more likely than the Maltese to use bring-in sites, throwing in 9kg of separated waste per capita, compared to the 7kg per Maltese resident.
The bring-in sites were less popular than the Recycle Tuesdays initiative: only 2.95 million kg of separated waste was collected from the bring-in sites, compared to the 6m kg collected directly from homes.

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