Ekologistak Martxan calls for intervention in more than 1,500 abandoned or unused landfills in Álava, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa

Ekologistak Martxan has developed an online toolto provide information on classified Basque landfills based on the risk assessment carried out by landfill managers.

The spokesman for the environmental organization, Javier Vazquez, reported on Tuesday in Bilbao that the administrations are ignoring "landfills that are no longer used" and warned that this situation "creates not only a major environmental problem, but also a public health problem".

In the presentation of the website, they also stress that the European Commission acknowledges that the Spanish State 'has not taken the necessary measures to comply with these requirements of the waste framework directive', as reported by Ecologists in Action.

The members of the association have developed an online tool to visualize the location of the dump sites and the chips containing all the information collected about them.

The inventory includes 1,562 landfills, 258 in Álava, 451 in Gipuzkoa, 616 in Bizkaia and 237 undocumented and unrecorded landfills, with only registered land.

The application allows access to 1,120 landfills with risk assessment, excluding those that do not have sufficient information to carry out the assessment and those that are undocumented.

The risk assessment has been carried out on the basis of data provided by landfill managers through the chips managed by Ihobe and grouped into five categories of risk: infrastructure, hydrology, geology, the human environment, conditions and impacts.

Ekologistak Martxan has warned that landfills such as Artxanda (Bilbao), Etxe Uli (Santurtzi), Jata (Lemoiz) and Premabi (Sondika) have been "very well known" by administrations for decades, and that they have not acted because of "lack of political will".

It has also regretted that when intervening in these contaminated soils, it is done for "economic interest".