Rehabilitation of the landfill in Vinca is the largest project in the field of environmental protection in Serbia and will be completed in 2022, Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said today.
During a tour of the construction site in Vinca, she said that the completion of the works would solve the decades-long problem of solid waste disposal in Belgrade, in accordance with European standards, which will improve the lives of the inhabitants of the Serbian capital.
“This is the largest public-private partnership project in Serbia, a model of cooperation that we should use more in the future,” said Brnabic and reminded that the rehabilitation of the landfill in Vinca is done by the French-Japanese consortium “Suez and Itochu” and that the value of the project is 370 million euros.
She added that the project is important for the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) this and next year.
Deputy Mayor Goran Vesic pointed out that we are currently on the most valuable and largest construction site in Belgrade.
– At this place, the city of Belgrade has been leaving 1,500 tons of waste every day for 46 years. 46 years ago, this was a bay, and today the waste is stacked approximately to the height of the Beogradjanka, over 80 meters, and this is one of the largest unregulated landfills in Europe. It was high time for Belgrade to solve the problem of its landfill because we no longer had a place to dispose of waste. In addition to dumping waste at an unregulated landfill, we pour a volume of 60,000 Olympic pools of feces into our rivers, the Sava and the Danube every year. And that was our relationship to nature and the environment. Here is one of our most important archeological sites nearby, near the river, last year we had to build a new dam to stop the landslide from slipping, so I am grateful to our partners from France and Japan as well as all the creditors who stood behind this project and that Belgrade will finally manage its waste like other European cities – said Vesic.
He thanked the Government of the Republic of Serbia for its support and pointed out that this is the largest public-private partnership in this part of Europe.
– There is a plant here from which electricity will be produced from waste, thermal energy will be produced, the City of Belgrade is already working on the heating transmission line from the Konjarnik to Vinca heating plant, we will use landfill gases to heat Belgrade and thus solve the fire problem at the old landfill. So, by the end of the year, we will have a new landfill, a plant for processing construction waste, there will be no more “wild” landfills in Belgrade and Serbia, because construction waste will also be processed here. After that, the old landfill will be closed and finally we will no longer have an environmental bomb in the center of Belgrade. These are historical things for Belgrade, they are done once a century, like the wastewater treatment plant in Veliko Selo. That means that we are finally solving decades of problems that no one knew and was able to solve, as well as to provide the necessary money – said Vesic, thanking all the participants in the project.
The contract on the construction of a regional center for waste treatment in Vinca was signed in September 2017 between the City of Belgrade and the Suez-Itochu consortium.
The project envisions the rehabilitation of an existing landfill, one of the largest open-air landfills in Europe, the construction of a new storage center and an incineration unit where electricity and heat will be produced, Danas reports.
