Lefkimmi΄s unrelenting waste problem
Rubbish returns to haunt Lefkimmi like the Furies. Twenty-five years of mismanagement have done more than leave the streets piled high with waste. They have destroyed public trust and a sense of social responsibility, paving the way for privatisation. Now citizens risk paying the price both for the failure and for the supposed solution.
The failure of the past 25 years has left behind more than just mountains of rubbish. It has undermined public trust, eliminated any possibility of local planning and today provides the strongest argument in favour of privatisation.
Rubbish pursues the people of Lefkimmi like the Furies. Not because they resisted the regional plan that was once supposedly imposed on their area, but because, along the way, every effort of their own to plan waste management was also abandoned. Such a plan should have been an integral and complementary part of waste management across the entire island.
One might say that this is hardly the time for such talk. But over the past 25 years, criminal ineffectiveness, carelessness and, often, arbitrary decision-making in dealing with the problem have done more than simply pile up rubbish. They have also eroded social awareness – the most fundamental prerequisite for the success of any modern waste management system.
Successive local administrations have provided a masterclass in how to undermine public responsibility. More or less the same people, rotating through positions of responsibility, fostered the belief that waste is always someone else's problem. Instead of participation, sorting at source and local responsibility, what prevailed were delays, shifting the costs elsewhere and the constant search for a temporary fix. Yet society itself, both in its institutional and independent capacity, cannot escape its share of responsibility either.
Meanwhile, the growing involvement of major business groups points towards a system of waste management increasingly dependent on private interests. Privatisation is being presented as the answer to the failure of the public system, invoking precisely the failings of those who brought that system into disrepute.
As a result, society risks paying twice over: first for the incompetence and arbitrary actions of successive administrations, and then for the increased cost of a waste management system that will be presented to it as an unavoidable salvation.
Lefkimmi is not being punished for resisting. It is also paying the price for having abandoned the opportunity to shape its own contribution to the solution. And the whole of Corfu is paying alongside it. After all, the Furies pursue not only those who committed the wrong, but everyone else as well. All of us...
GIORGOS KATSAITIS
