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Rama's former deputy minister: Who is keeping the gasoline bottle at the Vlora landfill?

Politiko 2025-06-07 18:58:28

Rama's former deputy minister: Who is keeping the gasoline bottle at the

By Ornela Çuçi

When the smoke from burning waste in the Vlora landfill rises over the city, it's no longer just a bad smell, it's a metaphor for everything we burn every day in this country: health, tourism, transparency, and the future.

Instead of recycling plastic, we are recycling promises, as in this election campaign. Instead of collecting waste, we are collecting dioxin particles in our lungs. And while we are talking about 12 million tourists, they and all the residents of Vlora today breathe PAH, PCB, and PM2.5 particles in doses that even the toxicology book cannot handle without a mask.

Dioxins don't need a European passport to enter our blood, nor a public tender to give us cancer. And the lead emitted today in Vlora? It settles into children's brains faster than any curriculum.

The Sherishta landfill is no longer a technical problem. It is a tragic symbol of the inability to manage yesterday without burning tomorrow.

If there is a smell that not even the Ionian Sea can cover, it is that of politics, which burns in the same fire as the garbage. And as always, those who breathe the most are those who are least to blame.

Meanwhile, the Minister of Tourism and Environment created a National Waste Agency, not to stop trash burning, but perhaps to burn some new payroll. Because Albania doesn’t need a functioning waste system, it needs some jobs and some new international funds to justify the “engagement.”

And when the smoke clears, the funds drop dramatically in the ministry's management. Ironic, right?

As for the mayor, charged with the legal responsibility to manage and protect the city from pollution, he has chosen to denounce the landfill to the prosecutor's office, as if it were a random passerby caught unprepared by the fire.
This year too, he has decided to pursue someone in an unknown direction!
If we didn't know that he himself is responsible for its management, we would think that it was burned by a drunk tourist and not the incompetence of the institutions that have been covering the problem with mud and then tar for decades.

And maybe one day we will understand that the landfill fires are not just a consequence of waste, but of our collective indifference that burns slowly, without smoke, but with much more serious consequences.

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