The Municipality of Thira produces a yearly average of 30.000 tons of MSW. These are produced from households and mainly from the tourism industry of the island (hotels, restaurants. B&Bs etc. The MSW is separated at source in two streams: recyclable materials and rest solid household waste. The recyclable materials stream is led to a local recyclable material sorting plant that operates since 2015. The materials are processed, packaged and sent for re-usage according to the cooperation scheme between the Municipality of Thira and the Hellenic Recovery Recycling Corporation. The rest solid municipal waste is led to the landfill that operates on Thira. The Municipality of Thira has completed a Master Plan that includes a treatment plant and a new landfill site.
The infrastructure of the Municipality of Thira currently the following:
- 2.500 Municipal Solid Waste Bins (Color: Green or Grey metallic)
- 500 Municipal Recycling Waste Bins (Color: Blue)
- 200 blue bins with a tri-color cap (100 yellow and 100 red and 50 blue)
- 2 vehicles 16 m3 (press type) for the collection of recyclable materials
- 5 vehicles from 12 to m3 (press type) for the collection of waste
- 6 press containers of 10 m3 waste capacity
- 1 container transport truck
- 2 small vehicles for MSW collection and transfer
From 2020 onwards
The municipality of Thira has set to achieve following goals by 2020:
- The creation of a separate collection stream for the municipal organic waste and a treatment facility that will be used at a pilot scale for demonstration and educational purposes.
- Strengthen additional waste streams that can be removed from the rest waste stream.
- Deploy a large scale informative and awareness program that will cover the whole population of the island.
- The implementation of the Waste Treatment Master Plan.
Given that funding will be granted for the submitted proposal of Thira municipality on an advanced landfill – submitted on November, 2016 –, the facilities for waste treatment will be enhanced by a total investment of 1.050.000,00 €. While the projected projections for the year 2019 suggested an increase of only 1.5% compared to base year 2012 in the total volume of waste, a much higher increase is detected within the last three years. As such it can be assumed that the volume of total waste is increasing by almost 100% over the year, whereas on an annual basis this percentage reaches 25%.
