Minister: Issue of smoke from Thilafushi will be solved next year

Environment Minister Dr. Hussain Rasheed has stated that the issue of smoke rising from Thilafushi and enveloping the neighboring densely populated islands such as Male' city and Villingili will be solved next year.

The Minister said so as he was speaking at the ceremony to award MTCC the project to manage the landfill in Thilafushi and import landfill compactors. He stated that the landfill would be cleared up as soon as the compactors were brought in and that the process of purchasing new machines for the project was also underway.

“The waste in Thilafushi will be taken apart and recycled. The situation that the landfill is currently in, requires machines to filter and recycle the waste,”

“The issue of smoke rising from Thilafushi will be solved next year with the establishment of waste facilities. The whole project is expected to take around four years.” said the Minister.

The landfill area currently has waste piled up on top of waste, according to the Minister, which is the reason why the dump is so high in height. The Minister also stated that even if it rained, the fire underneath the dump was still burning and resulted in the smoke affecting islands nearby.

The most important work right now was to roll over the upper parts of the dump and douse the fire burning underneath, and this was the time when the waste would be filtered, according to the Minister.

“Most of this waste, according to experts is soil, that’s around 60 percent. The dump will be reduced in size when all this sand is filtered. Things such as tins, minerals, metals, wood, plastic, and clothing will remain underneath.” said the Minister before noting that there was no reason why these items could not be recycled. The Minister also stated that the process of incinerating and bundling the waste would see the size of the waste dump reduced dramatically.