TEHRAN — Municipalities have so far failed to perform effective waste management nationwide, the deputy director of the Department of Environment said on Saturday.

Unfortunately in a northern city the waste has been piled to a height of 100 meters in landfills while some 18 liters of leachate is being drained from it per second, Saeed Motesaddi lamented, warning, “This is an environmental disaster”.

The best way to manage waste is to collect and manage leachate in the first place but one or two waste management organizations in the country are capable of providing effective waste management services and in other cases the leachate flow directly in to the soil, groundwater, springs or rivers, IRNA quoted Motesaddi as saying.

Waste sorting is pretty vital to waste management and should become a priority for the municipalities, he highlighted, stating, sadly in metropolis of Tehran some 7,000 tons of waste is being produced on a daily basis which is not being segregated efficiently.

Mentioning the current obsession with incinerators, Motesaddi noted that sorting the waste, recycling it, and producing compost are of greater importance than developing incinerators.

He finally expressed hope that the newly elected Tehran city councilors and the would-be mayor direct more attention to waste management in Tehran. 

MQ/MG