The road to the landfill now leads to a small lake formed in the hole intended for trash. The plastic lining has had to be replaced three times already. [Vangelis Zavos]
The guard hauls open the 75-meter-long metal door to let us in. The facility is fenced, but the one person left to guard the property cannot possibly oversee the entire premises, which stretches across 55 hectares. Construction and other valuable materials and equipment have been left lying around, unprotected, for years. Thieves and vandals strike often, but their raids don’t seem to make an impression or prompt an official reaction. During the Christmas holidays, in fact, thieves drove a crane into the site and made off – comfortably, with no one on their tails – with a 2-ton generator worth 120,000 euros.
This is the Sanitary Landfill Waste Site (HYTA) of Grammatiko, near Marathon, in northeastern Attica. It is a project that was designed last century, in 1993, and given the green light in 2003, after the European Union had already passed a directive ordering the closure of such landfills and instructing member-states to implement new methods of trash management that did not involve internment. Plans for the project caused an uproar in the local community, whose pushback caused construction to halt on numerous occasions. It was eventually built in 2019, at a total cost of 35 million euros, of which €11 million came from European funds – the rest was footed by the Greek taxpayer. The facility never operated, though, so even that 11 million euros had to be returned to Brussels. In short, millions of euros have been thrown onto the trash heap of a project that could have been instrumental in helping the region of Attica deal with its mounting waste disposal problem. In the meantime, the region’s municipal authorities continue to bury their trash at the landfill in Fyli, north of the capital, in defiance of the European Commission’s explicit environmental guidelines, wasting even more taxpayer money.
Only the ruins of a ghost project remain at the Grammatiko landfill site today. A massive pit filled with water, its side walls covered with the tattered remnants of plastic liners intended to stop leakages, gapes open just 1.5 kilometers from the sea – it is a monument to political hypocrisy and administrative incompetence.
The methane processing unit, which was supposed to harness the gas generated by the decomposition of waste, sits a few meters away, connected by large pipes to the main pit. A sign reading “Biogas Combustion” points to a hillside, as the facility was never actually built.
The liquid waste treatment plant that was supposed to help the landfill process all sorts of waste was built using the newest technology at the time, only to turn into a home for fish and frogs. This is where the generator was stolen from. And the garage intended for repairing the garbage collection trucks using the landfill is being used instead to store pipes and signposts designed to point the way to the facility from the town of Grammatiko.
The project for the construction of the landfill at the Integrated Waste Management Facility in Grammatiko, with a total capacity of 127,500 tons per year, was contracted on October 31, 2007, with a construction timeline of 21 months. Since then, it has started and stopped dozens of times due to residents’ opposition as well as flaws in the initial studies.
It is worth noting that the bulk of the work progressed during the term as regional governor of Attica of leftist SYRIZA’s Rena Dourou, who had opposed the project during her election campaign, and during the tenure of Ilias Psinakis as mayor of Marathon. “The last phase of construction took place in September 2019,” recalls a local resident.
A few months earlier, in May, the regional authority had changed hands and the new governor, Giorgos Patoulis, had voiced his determination to get the landfill up and running. In the years that followed, a string of delays in the lawsuits filed by residents against the municipal authority, the area’s declaration as a Natura habitat and a decision by the Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, paving the way for the creation of trash incineration units – one of which was slated to be constructed at Grammatiko – prompted Patoulis to choose the path of political self-preservation. “We’re moving on,” he said when asked to comment on the Grammatiko issue shortly before the 2023 regional elections.
Patoulis already had the European Commission’s decision rescinding the EU funding of 11,069,753 euros for the project and asking for the amount to be returned. The Attica governor initially tried to bypass the “fiscal correction” order by carrying out a few trial runs at the landfill, but the money was eventually returned and the facility, which currently belongs to the Attica Regional Authority, ended up being paid for in full by the Greek state.
As recently as last May, the construction company officially withdrew from the landfill, and jurisdiction over it was transferred to the Region of Attica. There was no formal handover.
Hundreds of emails were exchanged between the Greek and EU authorities over the course of 20 years, with the requests for continued funding in recent years for a project that never got off the ground intensifying. The Commission’s response, however, left no room for more excuses and delays: “The project CCI 2004GR16CPE10 ‘Construction of a landfill in North East Attika at Mavro Vouno Grammatikou,’ co-financed by the Cohesion Fund in the programming period 2000-2006 concerned the construction of the waste management plant in the area of Grammatiko/Greece. The project aimed at creating a fully controlled landfill, which would fulfill the scientific standards in order to bring to an end the uncontrolled disposal of waste in the area of Attica, Greece. The project was supposed to be completed and in use by December 31, 2011. Despite repeated assurances from the Greek authorities that the project was in the process of being finalized, it is in light of the fact that it was neither completed nor in use that the Commission services launched the financial correction procedure proposing a financial correction of 100% of the Cohesion Fund assistance granted to the project.”