Most of the country still isn’t ready for separate waste collection.
Parts of the Decision on Waste Management, adopted by the Croatian government, discriminate against towns and municipalities and utility companies which have established the best waste management systems in Croatia. According to Siniša Radiković, the director of the utility company Pre-Kom from Prelog in Međimurje County, towns like Prelog and Krk, which have been presented for years as positive examples of waste management systems, will also have to pay an incentive fee for reducing the amount of mixed municipal waste, regardless of the fact they have already fulfilled all the targets set for the year 2020, reports Večernji List on November 14, 2017.
“We have been promised that this part of the decision will be altered, but that hasn’t been done yet,” said Radiković.
The decision came into force on 1 November, and it will be implemented starting from 1 February 2018. It should equalise the quality of waste management services across the country. The minimum service scope must include the collecting of mixed communal, biodegradable, usable and bulk waste.
Pre-Kom says they already offer their users four different garbage bins, brown, black, yellow and blue, and they also collect branches and Christmas trees, provide additional bags for used diapers for families with small children, while all users with brown bins get extra 50 litres of the substrate as a gift. They have also built the necessary facilities, composting, sorting, and reuse centres.
“Since most of Croatia is not ready for the implementation of the new regulation, there will be a significant increase in prices of public services in the whole of Croatia, by between 30 and 100 percent. Pre-Kom and local self-government units in this region have developed a waste management system, and on that basis, in the last two years, there have been two drops in prices of services, by 6 and 10.6 percent. However, to bring us in line with the new regulations, we now expect an increase by about seven percent,” explained Radiković.
Frane Mrakovčić, director of the Ponikve Eko Otok Krk utility company, said he hoped that the controversial parts of the decision would be amended. “The problem is that the new regulations do not provide incentives for those who dispose of less waste in landfills,” he concluded.
The new regulations are considered to be challenging to implement for most towns and municipalities in Croatia because there is no infrastructure to measure the amount of waste, which should provide the basis for calculation of prices for end users. Radiković believes that citizens of Croatia will pay between 300 and 400 million kuna a year more for waste disposal than they have done so far.
Translated from Večernji List.
