The rolling business of Ibizan waste
The current political leaders sold us that importing waste from Ibiza was a perfect deal: the waste tax would go down by 10%, we would all benefit, and Tirme would manage it without any inconvenience for the thousands of neighbors who suffer from its proximity to Son Reus and the facilities managed by Tirme. They told us we shouldn't worry: that it wouldn't interfere with traffic, that it wouldn't increase noise, and that it wouldn't cause long periods of bad odors. But, a year later, the reality is quite the opposite.
To make this business balance, the Government has to put 50 million euros over ten years into the Council of Mallorca. And since it still doesn't balance, the Council has added, in three years, more than 103 million euros extra directly to Tirme: 43 million in 2023, 19 in 2024, and 41.4 million last July.
We are not saying this, it is said by the Council of Mallorca's own internal audit in a devastating report that speaks of a 77% profitability for the concessionaire and facts that could constitute embezzlement of public funds. The Accounts Chamber says it: these payments were not in the 2023 subsidy plan, they have no legal framework, no justification, and no guarantees for advance payment. And they do not respond to any economic rebalancing of the contract.
The question is obvious: if importing waste from Ibiza was so profitable, why do we have to subsidize Tirme with 103 million euros?
The answer is also obvious. The Son Reus incinerator needs to eat. Since we are doing a little more recycling in Mallorca and generating less waste, Tirme needs tons from elsewhere to maintain its margin. And it has found them at the Ca na Putxa landfill in Ibiza.
But Tirme, meanwhile, in its advertising campaigns, claims that "its waste management model implemented on the island allows them to achieve the strategic goal of zero waste." It is a statement that does not stand up to reality: the data and management experience prove the opposite. Zero waste is not achieved by incinerating: it is achieved by avoiding the generation of the waste fraction. And an incinerator, by definition, needs waste to exist.
With the fortune that the Council of Ibiza and the Government allocate to the transport of waste to Son Reus and the Council of Mallorca to subsidize Tirme, the foundations could be laid for a new, environmentally advanced waste prevention and management model that respects the priorities in the European waste management hierarchy.
These principles place acting through prevention, with reduction and reuse, at the highest level of priority before products become waste.
Preventing waste production is preferable to managing it, which is why selective collection as well as recycling, energy recovery, and final disposal, in that order, are part of the lower part of the waste management hierarchy.
Complying with the principles of the hierarchy of European waste management regulations implies a paradigm shift in the waste management model in Ibiza, but also in Mallorca and Menorca. It means implementing a highly advanced waste management system, at the level of the environmental challenges we face and the standards we aspire to achieve. That is why we must begin to adopt measures in favor of waste reduction, eliminating single-use packaging, single-dose items, and single-use products; and of reuse, fostering deposit and return systems, local reuse circuits, and extending the useful life of objects through their repair, exchange, loan, donation, and second-hand sale.
With prevention policies and high-efficiency selective collection systems, such as door-to-door, it should be possible to reduce the waste fraction to a minimum and, therefore, the needs for treatment in landfills or incineration.
Furthermore, environmentally advanced waste management based on prevention, reuse, local treatment, and proximity would be an opportunity for the creation of jobs and local industry.
Instead, rather than opting for a model of the future, with this operation they have turned us into the landfill of the Balearic Islands. Seven trucks a day, five days a week, crossing the sea so that we burn it here. Meanwhile, the tax that they were supposed to lower has not yet been approved either for 2025 or 2026. The opacity is total. Councilor Bestard accumulates controversies and zero transparency.
It is not a circular economy, it is a perfect business. It is an incineration economy. We pay with public money, and therefore, all of us, so that a private multinational can maintain its profits by burning the waste that another island has not known how to manage.
Stopping the transfer, stopping the extra 41 million, and thoroughly reviewing the tariff methodology is not being alarmist or a nuisance. It is defending the general interest.