WHILE in the past it seemed that waste processing did not appeal to Slovak entrepreneurs, nowadays the situation has reversed, with a number of projects worth millions of euros mushrooming across Slovakia. An increasing number of companies are starting to use waste to produce electricity and heat, or for reprocessing into new products. The possibility of obtaining subsidies from the EU Operational Programme Environment, the Recycling Fund as well as the Environmental Fund may further the boom, the Hospodárske Noviny daily wrote in April.
For example, Piliny Ladce plans to produce pellets from wood waste near Ilava, Mach Trade wants to process electronic waste and Auto Glass Recycling has already launched a plant in Trnava for glass waste processing.
The latter is designed for the mechanical processing of auto glass waste, hardened glass, safety glass and glass from electrical waste. The reprocessed material can be used again for glass production, the TASR newswire reported in early April. Before the launch of its glass processing line all of this special glass was simply dumped as there were no facilities in Slovakia for reprocessing it. Gabriela Tibenská, the company’s legal representative, informed that there are 33 kilograms of special glass in each car which cannot be recycled by standard methods, for example.
Radovan Kazda from the company Property & Environment specified for Hospodárske Noviny that recycling projects most often involve metal waste.
“This market keeps growing because scrap metal is an important commodity,” said Kazda.
The total volume of money available within the area of waste management of the EU Operational Programme Environment, i.e. from EU funds and the state budget, exceeds €500 million. But in spite of this available money, Slovakia lags in effective usage of waste, the daily wrote
“Here [in Slovakia] the trend is to dump all the waste, which benefits [the] companies operating [the waste facilities],” said Štefan Hanigovský, legal representative of Fecupral and member of the Association of Entrepreneurs in Waste Management. He said that the more forward-thinking trend is to process the waste for the production of electricity and replace fossil fuels.
Michal Veselý added that waste management in Slovakia is in a very bad state.
“There are a lot of waste dumps, which will be not able to accept waste any more in a short period of time.”
