Seventy percent of waste is recyclable and can earn money and councils must work with the private sector to solve their recycling problems, speakers declared yesterday during a forum on the sidelines of the Libya Clean Exhibition 2025 organised by the Ministry of Local Government.
The forum was attended by several council / municipality officers from across Libya, including very small councils / municipalities.
Small towns, councils and municipalities must work with the private sector
Ibrahim Bin Dakhil, Director General of the General Administration for Environmental Sanitation Affairs, said councils or municipalities of small towns of 10,000 to 20,000, who don’t have huge budgets, don’t need huge budgets for their recycling. He said they just need a space for their collected rubbish to be sorted into cartons and paper, cans, organic matter, and plastics, then the private sector will buy and collect their sorted recyclable waste.
He said smaller councils far away from the large population centres do not need to deliver their recyclable materials and do not need to invest in trucks or vans to deliver them to recycle centres.
Bin Dakhil said this is much better than incinerating, burning, mounting it in large open rubbish dumps or burying it in landfill sites.
He said there is no justification for every small council in investing in their own recycling centres as that is very inefficient as the private sector will do the recycling job. He accused councils of seeking huge budgets from central government for purposes of commissions, kickbacks and corruption.
Bin Dakhil pointed to the many ‘‘Green Towns’’ in Europe who work in an efficient, realistic and practical way. They don’t all have their own recycling centres. They collect, sort and outsource the actual recycling to larger centres.
Councils and municipalities must work with the private sector innovatively
Bin Dakhil said councils and municipalities must start to work in an innovative way with the private sector. He said the private sector will collect sorted recyclable waste from the remote areas of Libya if it is in sufficient volumes to cover the cost of transport to larger recycling centres. He explained that the cost of transport can then be deducted from the cost of the collected recyclable waste.
He said councils must be proactive in working with the now active private sector. He reminded councils that it is their legal duty to collect rubbish and that they are free from central government interference in this sector. They must not wait for solutions from central government in solving their waste collection and recycling matters. They must find shared interests with the private sector and find innovative solutions.
Other speakers on stage and from the audience, including a recycling company, pointed to one example of providing sorting bins for plastic bottles to facilitate collection.
It was also pointed out that it was the private sector that helped the Te Te Rally held in the desert dunes of central Libya collect the sorted waste after the rally organisers collected and sorted the waste at the site.
A Tunisian speaker pointed out that studies in his country showed that the state is inefficient in the collection of recyclable waste compared to the private sector by a margin of 20 to 35 percent.
It was pointed out that an average Libyan produces an average of one kilo of recyclable waste with Tripoli estimated to produce an average of 2,400 tons of recyclable waste per day. All this waste can generate money for councils, it was re-emphasised.
This forum comes as part of a series of activities accompanying Libya Clean 2025, which in its third edition continues to highlight the most important national initiatives aimed at protecting the environment and promoting sustainable development.
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