The Alliance against Waste Imports (AKIP), which has continued to successfully oppose the waste management law over the last few years, has released a statement responding to Prime Minister Edi Rama, who yesterday called the opponents of his ill-fated law “smugglers.”
In a TV interview a few days ago, Prime Minister Rama had said the following about his wast management law:
The project that we withdrew is not the import of waste, but the possibility for the recycling industry to import wood, cardboard, glass, and aluminium.
We withdrew it for a simple reason, not to allow the intoxication up to blindness of a part of public opinion by waste smugglers who do politics with waste and make waste of politics.
We will not activate [this law] until we have detoxified public opinion until the point that there is reason to believe and suspect […] that there is trust for such a sensitive issue.
AKIP responded in its declaration:
AKIP stresses that prohibiting the import of waste is a civil cause inspired by citizens themselves against politicians who for clientelist and corrupt interests have tried for 14 years to bring waste to Albania to incinerate them.
We remind Rama that in the articles that allow the import of waste, reproposed in 2016, after their collapse in 2013 by the same majority, not only allows the import for recycling purposes (the incineration of recyclable waste has already started in Elbasan) but also imports for incineration, camouflaged as a replacement of burning material for the industry.
AKIP also expressed it support for the inhabitants of Verri, which in recent days have been face with police violence and arrests after protesting against the construction of a waste incinerator near their village, despite the electoral promises of their PS mayor that no incinerator would be built, and despite the 2013 election promise of Rama that no waste would be allowed to enter the country.
