During a news conference on March 7, representatives of initiative committees from villages in the northern Sofia region at Novi Iskur said that there was a direct connection between Sofia refuse and the cement companies that wanted to start extracting raw materials used for making cement around Novi Iskur. Representatives of initiative committees from Koubratovo and Negovan and from the Eco Mramor association said that Sofia municipality had made a silent agreement with the cement companies Holsim and Titan Cement to give them the villages’ land, while, in exchange, the firms would burn Sofia household refuse in their furnaces.
Eco Mramor association chairperson Snezhinka Tsvetanova said that the deputy Sofia mayor in charge of ecology Maria Boyadjiiska had confirmed this in an informal conversation with association representatives in the beginning of February. Boyadjiiska said that the city did not want to get into a dispute with the cement companies, as they had promised to burn the bundled refuse. Contacted by The Sofia Echo on March 7, Boyadjiiska declined to comment on those statements.
The technology of separating only the glass and metal refuse and making the remaining household refuse into bundles that would then be burned was observed by representatives of Sofia while in 2006 in Berlin, Ivan Ginev said. He is a chemical engineer who spoke at the news conference on March 7.
“Sofia wanted to sell the bundled refuse but we objected, so the municipality decided to propose the bundles to the cement factories,” Ginev said.
However, incineration in those factories is not that easy, as it is connected to technological changes and this is not profitable for the cement factories, according to Ginev.
“Therefore Sofia municipality has decided to cede parts of the Sofia plain to the cement producers and in exchange they agreed to burning the bundles,” he said.
The household refuse burning technology observed in Berlin was old, and the German municipality was trying to get rid of it, according to Tsvetanova. By burning waste, a lot of poisonous dioxins and furans are emitted that harm the human and animal health within a 30km radius of the incineration unit. Tsvetanova said that it was possible that Sofia wanted to buy the second-hand German incineration equipment, as it would be much cheaper than creating an ecologically friendly refuse factory in Bulgaria.
The exchange area in question is located in the northern Sofia plain and is part of the changes in the Sofia Master Plan that foresee city expansion in this direction. However, initiative committee representatives claimed that their agriculture lands were very fruitful and the local people were still planting vegetables of a very good quality there. Tsvetanova said that they had requested a statement of the Soil Institute, which then confirmed that the soil in this region was very fertile and rich in humus. In the neighbourhood is Mramor Dam, a zone proposed for inclusion in the Natura 2000 environmental network.
Reni Radeva from the Koubratovo initiative committee said that the state wanted to change the land status from agriculture to technologically damaged areas that need recultivation. As such, the land could be easily sold at a low price, and later destroyed and polluted. About 12 to 15 euro a sq m was proposed to the landowners for their lands, Radeva said. “The villages’ population is horrified,” she said.
Only 200 of the 4180 decares in question were property of Novi Iskur municipality. Tsvetanova said that the plan was for the cement companies to dig a 20 to 30 metre stone pit, which would be very dangerous for the nearby villages of Koubratovo, Svetovrachane, Negovan and Chepintsi because it would lead to landslides in the area. Maya Dimitrova, a representative of the initiative committees of all four villages, said that after a stone quarry was dug in the region of Negovan in 2005, an “ecological catastrophe” followed when the two rivers in the region, the Iskur and the Lesnovska, flooded.
The initiative committees said that the mayors of all those villages were against the extraction of cement-making materials. They are preparing a statement that is to be filed with Sofia municipality on March 10. The local residents, about 20 000 people in total, were also trying to collect enough signatures in order to be able to receive permission for a referendum on the issue.
