"We aim to create the necessary preconditions for cities and municipalities, including those that have closed down their landfills, to be able to dispose of their municipal waste at some of the still active regulated landfills, which will continue to operate until the construction of county/regional waste management centres," the Fund's director, Luka Balen, told Hina.
He added that the Economy and Sustainable Development Ministry wanted those active regulated landfills to be financially assisted through the Fund so that the investment causes as few additional costs for city and municipal budgets as possible.
More than 30 such landfills will be 90% financed by the Fund, and the investment is estimated to exceed €20 million, he said.
Over the past few years the Fund has provided local government units and their waste management companies with more than €150 million to improve their waste management systems.
This amount is now to increase because under a recent decision by the ministry, the share of co-financing landfill remediation has been raised to as much as 90% of the eligible costs.
According to media reports, the Constitutional Court on 18 April quashed a decision whereby former minister Tomislav Ćorić in 2018 closed down 27 landfills because they did not meet the necessary legal conditions, redirecting their waste to suitable landfills, whose remediation will now be co-financed by the ministry.
Ivana Marković, the mayor of Supetar, a town on the island of Brač, is satisfied with this decision. Together with the mayors of other Brač island communities she attended a meeting at the Fund at which activities were agreed regarding the remediation of the Supetar landfill that will remain open to waste from other Brač communities.
The Fund says that it will encourage local government units to increase the rate of waste sorting, having published this year six calls, worth around €23 million, for applications for the co-financing of equipment for waste sorting, remediation of unauthorised dumps, construction of mini waste transfer stations on the islands, transport of waste from the islands to the mainland, removal of illegally dumped car tyres from the islands, and educational and information campaigns about the importance of proper waste management.
Available for that are also more than ample funds under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and the EU Competitiveness and Cohesion Programme.
Officials at the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund note that work has been stepped up on the construction of waste management centres.
By the end of the year, in addition to the already operational centres in Primorje-Gorski Kotar, Istria and Šibenik-Knin counties, the waste management centre at Biljane Donje will be put into operation for a test run, which will solve the problem of waste management in Zadar County as well.
"All of this is aimed at making the waste management system record increasingly good results by the year, and in 2022 the waste sorting rate was 46%," Balen said.
Asked when new rules on packaging waste would be adopted and whether the deposit refund, now amounting to 0.07 euro cents and being the lowest in the EU, would be increased, ministry officials said that the new rules were being prepared for publication in the Official Gazette.
As for the regulation on the waste management fee and the deposit refund, ministry officials said that work on it was under way and that it would be put to e-consultation.
Environmental activists have called on the ministry to increase the deposit refund.
They believe that return packaging and recycling systems should be organised locally and be publicly owned so as to ensure that public interest is put before the profit of individual companies.