The regional secretary for the Environment and the Sea guaranteed today, in Horta, that the management of residues extolled by the Government for Pico will “solve the problem of the garbages in that island for a decade”.

The information was advanced by Ana Paula Marques alongside the meeting that she had this morning with representatives of three municipalities of Pico for presentation of the project of valorisation of the residues in the island-mountain.

As explained the regional secretary, the Echocentre to be built in Pico will have several services and aims at solving “all the problems that there are of treatment and valorisation of residues in that island” of the Central Group.

She remembered that Pico already has a sanitary landfill, “properly licensed and working”, being lacking to create “a centre of selection and a central office of organic valorisation by composting, with the respective treatment of residual waters”.

“That’s what we will do now”, said Ana Paula Marques, anticipating that the construction of the new equipment, which will be introduced in the council of Madalena, “will be put to public tender in short time”.

For the regional secretary for the Environment and the Sea, the sewers are still, unfortunately, necessary for lack of local solution for some types of garbages but that is an image that will end, in definite, in the island of Pico.

Besides more, the governor added that Pico has the peculiarity of having 34% of its area protected and of having the biggest area of Natural Network in the Region, which contributes to value even more its “strong potential for the development of the tourism of nature”.

She still told that two of the nine Azorean islands will keep private systems of management of residues, having the Government assumed the responsibility to build echocentres in the islands where the municipalities were revealing bigger difficulties in the construction of the necessary infrastructures.

In case of Flores and Graciosa, the public tender for the construction of the echocentres in both islands is current at present, in an investment that will probably exceed eight million euros.