Portugal is submitting nonsensical data to Brussels on waste disposal and recycling rates despite two publically funded agencies working on what should not be too taxing a task.
Environmental collective, Zero, says that Portugal hasn’t a clue how much urban solid waste its citizens and industry is producing or how much is recycled, with "errors and discrepancies" in the data from the two bodies responsible whose cost to the State is enarly €12 million a year.
"There is no coherence or coincidence of values between the data presented by the Water and Waste Services Regulatory Body (ERSAR) and the APA (Portuguese Environment Agency)," said Rui Berkemeier of Zero whose experts have looked at the official reports for 2015 submitted by the two bodies and concludes that Portugal is in no position to submit credible data to the European Commission.
"When we analyse in detail various urban waste treatment systems, we find that in the ERSAR data there are cases where it’s clearly wrong, there are situations where it is said that organic waste is recycled that has not even been produced and there are recycling rates presented by ESAR that are completely wrong," said the environmentalist, adding that “if there is no credible data, the entire system is called into question.”
Portugal has European targets to be met for the recycling of urban waste and needs to fill in annual reports on the amount of glass, paper, metal and plastic that has been collected and recycled, and another that lists the tonnage of organic waste.
Among the cases mentioned by Zero is one where a recycling rate for organic material was reported in excess of the tonnage of the organic matter in the waste entering the recycling plant.
Berkemeier commented that in a system where there is poor control, bad practices will be encouraged which are extremely dangerous and “is giving a bad signal to the future of urban waste management in Portugal."
Portugal has targets set out in the PERSU 2020 (Strategic Plan for Urban Waste) and the evaluation of compliance is dependent on reliable and credible data, which is far from the case currently.
Since 2015, many of the municipal waste service companies have been privatised, including ALGAR in the Algarve. With these botched figures swirling around the system, it is now impossible to assess the performance of these companies or to issue penalties.
ZERO has demanded that the Ministry of the Environment, in particular the Secretary of State for the Environment, Carlos Martins, analyses this situation and takes immediate steps to create a system of data collection and validation that is accurate and therefore, credible.
ZERO also pointed out that the taxpayer would be save a lot of expense it there was just one reporting system from one State agency, rather the current system where two agencies manage to produce wildly differing and inaccurate data at a cost of €12 million a year.
