Since its only landfill reached saturation a month ago, Athens has been in the grip of a garbage crisis. Mountains of refuse filled the streets in early January, spilling out of garbage cans and marring the face of one of the world’s most fabled cities. As the days wore on and no solution was found, bags were savaged by stray dogs and cats. Pedestrians faced a daily battle to circumnavigate the rot.

The crisis eased somewhat in mid-January when the authorities began taking rubbish to a temporary landfill that was, in effect, an extension of the old one. But now that, too, is brimming, and trash is being dumped in a new landfill that has been set up alongside it.

“There isn’t space for one more piece of garbage,” said Philippos Kirkitsos, president of the Ecological Recycling Society, or Ecorec, an independent organization. Since the landfill, in Ano Liosia, at the city’s northwest, reached capacity the authorities have had to scramble to find a place for the 6,000 tons of trash produced daily in this city of four million.

The 250-acre landfill, said by environmental groups to be the largest in Europe, is 520 feet high from partly treated sewage, toxic hospital waste, construction rubble and household trash, besieged by seagulls scavenging for scraps. The site violates a European Union directive aimed at reducing the volume of waste in dumps, and it has been the scene of fires and landslides. A worker at Ano Liosia lost a leg in an accident there in December.

According to a new study by Athens University, the landfill’s dregs have seeped more than 300 feet underground, polluting the subsoil in neighboring coastal suburbs and the waters of the Saronic Gulf with what researchers called a “toxic time bomb that will exist for at least 60 years.”

The garbage crisis was, of course, long in the making. “This is the product of 20 years of neglect by central and local authorities,” said Constantinos Mnimatidis, head of the refuse management unit of the Union of Municipal Authorities in Attica, the greater Athens region, which manages the site. “We need to reduce the amount of trash being dumped or keep looking for new dumping sites.”

But the government’s efforts to find alternative landfills have stalled, with residents near two potential sites mounting court challenges. To make matters worse, the problems promise to expand beyond Athens. Greece is home to at least 3,700 illegal landfills that the European Union has ordered closed by year-end and replaced with waste treatment plants. The country faces fines in the billions of dollars if they are not.

The European Union’s environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, who is Greek, says Greece needs to recycle more and not just throw everything into a landfill. “Greece has failed to consider the waste hierarchy principle, where priority is given to the prevention of waste, then to its reuse, recycling and recovery,” Mr. Dimas said in a telephone interview.

European Union officials visiting the Athens landfill last month drew the same conclusion and warned that they may demand that Greece return some money unless the authorities here use it to promote recycling.

The new mayor of Athens, Nikitas Kaklamanis, a former health minister, has pledged to oversee the construction of at least one recycling plant in the next five years, as well as a “drying unit” that reduces the volume of garbage by removing moisture. But he said that “two or three more landfills” would also be needed.

Ecologists warn that fast action is needed because the current situation poses an environmental and public health risk. They have not endorsed the mayor’s plans. “We fear that this drying unit will mean the burning of refuse, which we strongly object to, as it is expensive and dangerous,” said Greenpeace’s national director, Niklos Charalambides.

The burning of plastic and certain other kinds of refuse at legal and illegal landfills across the country is also a concern. A fire at the Tagarades landfill in Salonika, Greece’s second-most-populous city, in July is believed to have been responsible for high levels of dioxins, an extremely toxic class of chemicals, found in local farm animals and in the milk produced by them.

“The burning of waste is catastrophic for the environment,” Mr. Dimas said, noting that the European Court of Justice indicted Greece in October for such activity. Athens contends that there has been significant progress since 2001, when the country belatedly brought its laws in line with European Union recycling laws. But improvements are far from evident.

In fact, the waste problem in Athens is not confined to the streets and landfill. Thousands of tons of toxic sludge have accumulated at the capital’s sewage processing plant, on an islet off the port of Piraeus. The partly treated sewage was being dumped at the Athens landfill — in violation of European Union law — until angry protests by residents put a stop to it. Some was sent to Germany last year after the sludge piled up so high that it was ready to spill into the sea.

But the rest, some 250,000 tons and counting, is awaiting the activation of a drying unit. The plant is expected to be ready in the next few months, but what will be done with the toxic residue it will produce is still unclear.
(By NIKI KITSANTONIS, NYT, 15/02/2007)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/world/europe/15greece.html?_r=2&ref=world&oref=slogin&oref=slogin