Sant’Antnin, we have a problem

When the head of the nation’s trash collection agency suggests people freeze their organic waste until collection day and when the mayor of one of the country’s largest localities calls for the troops to be brought in to control the garbage situation, you know there’s a problem.

With mountains of trash piling up across the country and attracting hordes of rats, Malta is beginning to resemble a Third World country more so than ever.

The problem, however, is clearly down to the country’s Third World, ham-fisted leadership, as its handling of this and other recent debacles has shown.

When the country was struck by close to two weeks of power cuts, Minister Julia Farrugia Portelli suggested we read a book.

When trash piles up in the streets, the most innovative suggestion WasteServ CEO Richard Bilocca could come up with was for people to resort to freezing their organic waste until collection day if they want to avoid those nasty stenches in their homes.

One wonders what the powers-that-be would come up with if there were to be a water outage. Would we be told to rediscover the benefits of not showering and letting our body’s natural oils do the job?

The situation would be comedic if it weren’t so tragic. And it is tragic because people’s lives are being affected on the most fundamental of levels by a bungling government that hops from one crisis to the next and, in the process, insults the people’s intelligence, and their tax euros, all along the way.

In the case of WasteServ CEO Richard Bilocca, it is understandable how a person in an ivory tower on a €123,000 annual salary could make such a suggestion. On that kind of remuneration, one could easily afford a brand-new freezer, perhaps even a walk-in cooler, to store one’s organic waste.

Not so for the more common folk. Bilocca would have been well-advised before uttering such an inane suggestion to have done a little research into white goods sales and usage. He surely has the means to do so.

If he had done so, he would have seen that most people’s freezers could not accommodate the storing of garbage. First off, he would have seen that the majority of the population do not have full-size or chest freezers. Many have much smaller appliances that are already full to the brim.

Meanwhile, those not possessing large or empty freezers are left storing their organic waste – the smelliest of all trash, especially in summer when fish consumption spikes – in their homes, on their balconies or rooftops… wherever they can.

In the process, that trash not only begins to stench in the summer heat but also attracts all kinds of insects and vermin, including, yes, rats.

Or perhaps the WasteServ CEO is suggesting people invest in one of those nifty trash-freezing contraptions that have failed miserably in the US and Swiss markets. Those set consumers back only a cool couple of hundred euros.

Mr Bilocca undoubtedly has the extra space to store his organic waste if not in his freezer, then somewhere else in his home. Being the WasteServ CEO, he is even likely to have the privilege of being able to take his organic waste to work with him each morning and dispose of it there.

As such, the WasteServ CEO’s suggestion, however helpful it may have seemed from his position, was a waste of oxygen. The mere fact that such a suggestion was made well and truly shows he does not have his finger on the pulse of the trash collection calamity for which he is responsible.

With each passing day, the WasteServ CEO is proving to be more of a waste of space and a waste of the over €10,000 a month he is being paid to infest the country with garbage and rats.

He clearly has to go but, for some reason, Energy and Environment Minister Miriam Dalli is standing by her man, just as she has with Enemalta CEO Jonathan Cardona who, despite multiple sources having confirmed his departure from Enemalta with The Shift, now appears to be staying put for a while in a bid to avoid embarrassment.

Perhaps even more inexplicably, the WasteServ CEO is also leading the commissioning of the controversial waste-to-energy incinerator in Magħtab.

The incinerator will burn our organic waste and convert it into energy. Beyond the questionable merits of having such an incinerator in this small country, Bilocca appears to be suggesting here that we ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’.

That is because the freezing of anything undoubtedly consumes additional energy, as a simple Google search shows. As such, Bilocca is shooting himself in the foot by suggesting people use extra energy to freeze their waste, which would then be incinerated to create more energy.

What he is suggesting here, in essence, is for people to waste the energy that will created by the waste-to-energy plant before it is even created.

There is clearly something wrong here in the formula. It would be interesting to see a cost-benefit analysis on the suggestion conducted by someone knowledgeable or qualified.

That person would certainly not be the WasteServ CEO.

The system needs to be changed, and there is a common consensus out there that the country is being grossly underserved by WasteServ.

These are not teething problems. The system has been with us for quite some time now. It’s a question of complete mismanagement and lack of foresight. The literal mess that the country is in  is a direct failure of the current CEO, who was responsible for overhauling the system.

Waste collection, a fundamental civic function, has become an abject failure under his watch, and someone needs to be held responsible or at least own up to the shortcomings, apologise and seek to make things right.

The answer is not to stubbornly stand your ground and come up with inane suggestions like freezing organic rubbish at home as garbage piles up on our increasingly rat-infested streets.

Perhaps the answer might lie in reverting responsibility for trash collection to the local councils. The problems only appeared to begin cropping up when waste collection was centralised at WasteServ.

As matters stand, local councils appear powerless to take any action, and people have nowhere to go except to the behemoth that is WasteServ where, unlike at the local council level, their complaints are more likely to fall on deaf ears.

Sant’Antnin, we have a problem. Not Sant’Antnin ta’ Padova but, rather, Sant’Antnin ta’ Marsascala, WasteServ’s headquarters.

Prayers to the former might help but the only solution for the latter is for heads to roll.