Tetovo’s waste will end up in Skopje


The Company Drisla LLC will earn 2 million euros by cleaning an illegal dump in the vicinity of Tetovo. The company Drisla LLC, which was established with a stake of 20% of the City of Skopje and 80% of the Italian FCL Ambiente, which operates the Skopje landfill Drisla, signed a contract for clearing the Falisa site. The constract was signed last Tuesday by Mayor Teuta Arifi and Drisla’s director Goran Angelov.

Drisla’s task will be to make a geodetic marking of the construction, to make a wide excavation on the ground with loading, to level the terrain with a grader, to construct a protective fence with wooden beams and barbed wire, and – to deposit 184 thousand cubic meters of waste at the landfill in Skopje! Only for landfilling and transportation of waste, Drisla will receive 1.5 million euros.

The director of Drisla LLC says that this contract does not harm the company in any way. According to him, the site to be cleaned is likely to be a sewage treatment plant and therefore the space should be cleared. Although Angelov says that it is mainly construction waste, in the contract that they signed was for cleaning and disposal of communal waste.

In order to get an answer to the questions about what kind of waste will be transported from the village of Falisa to Skopje and what exactly will be built on the site that needs to be cleared, we tried to contact Mayor Arifi, but she did not answer phone calls. We also sent SMS messages, but there is still no answer. Before the elections, Arifi promised citizens that a recyclable site will be built at this location.

Does Drisla have capacity for waste coming from other cities

According to European standards, the Drisla landfill is the largest and busiest landfill in the Balkans. It offers services to more than 600,000 families. In the Skopje landfill, waste from the capital and the surrounding area is deposited. But starting a few years ago, in Drisla began to carry the waste from Tetovo. In June last year, Drisla LLC signed a contract with the Public Utility Company Tetovo for the disposal of waste from the transfer station in Tetovo to the landfill in Skopje for 536 thousand euros.

“The waste that will be brought to Skopje is mainly construction waste, and Tetovo has long been taking waste into the Skopje landfill,” said Angelov.

Blaze Josifovski from the Ajde Makedonija movement says that the Drisla landfill has the capacity to collect such waste, but the main problem is that the waste from other cities will increase the negative environmental impact on Skopje.

“The situation is very bad and something must be done very soon. It would be best if the City of Skopje takes back Drisla under its authority and draft a new strategy for waste management, otherwise nothing will be achieved,”Josifovski said.

Silegov: The new concessionaire will be selected by March 15

The Italian company FCL Ambiente, which co-owns the Drisla LLC company with the City of Skopje, is about to lose the concession for the Skopje landfill. After seven years of trials and alibis, and not one denar of investment in Drisla, the Cityof Skopje, upon the order of the Administrative Court, should once again choose which company will be concessionaire of the Skopje landfill. The tender will not be repeated, but the City will have to choose from the companies that participated in the tender in 2012.

Three companies – the German Scholz, the Italian FCL Ambiente and the Austrian ASA International – joined in the first call for concession to Drisla in 2012.

The selection of the new concessionaire should be decided by a five-member commission composed of persons employed in the City of Skopje and the Ministry of Environment. Mayor Petre Silegov says the commission has no legal deadline for choosing the new concessionaire.

“The Commission is still working on a decision. My assessment is that the decision should be made by mid-March,” Silegov said.

FCL Ambiente had to invest 73 million euros in the first five years. So far, there’s nothing of the announced investments, there is not even a euro. The company says they have not invested in the landfill since they had a precarious investment environment, that is, they were all in court because of the lawsuits and complaints submitted by the German company.

According to the promises of the owners and former Mayor of Skopje, Koce Trajanovski, the modern European landfill was supposed to make a new facility for incineration of medical waste, which will replace the incinerator that was donated to Drisla in 1998. An automated car-wash for the trucks, new machinery for operation and a large administrative building were supposed to be built.
Part of the announced idea for the modernization of Drisla was to close half of the 35 hectares of the landfill with a kind of greenhouse and thus create conditions for organic waste to emit gas – methane that will later burn and the heat will produce electricity.

Regardless of the fact that there are no investments in Drisla and there are no conditions for production of electricity, the company FCL Ambiente, together with another company, G. ENIT LTD registered in London, on December 10 last year registered a new company in the country – MK Energy Group LLC. The priority activity is production of electricity, while the managers are: Domenico Ferazzoli, owner of FCL Ambiente and Alessandro D’Amato – director of G.Enit LTD. The company registered in London was formed in July 2015, and the owner D’Amato appears as the director of nine other active companies. The Energy Regulatory Commission has answered that the company MK Energy Group LLC has not yet requested any license for electricity generation.

What is the company that has not invested one single euro in Drisla in the past 7 years

According to the documents from the Italian Register of companies, FCL Ambiente was formed on February 14, 2012, or just three days before they and their consortium partner – the major Italian company UNIECO to bid for Drisla.

FCL Ambiente is owned by a network of companies of the firm Ferazzoli S.p.A., which according to the trade register is a small company and operates as a “financial intermediary”, and it had a turnover of 310,744 euros and profit of 7,715 euros in 2012.


Without the experience of UNIECO in ecology and construction, as well as profits and turnover greater than 500m euros, FCL Ambiente would not be able to secure the contract for the Skopje landfill.

However, it appears that UNIECO, apart from participating in the tender, has no further role in the Drisla project. The company does not even appear as an owner along with FCL Ambiente in the new public-private partnership, which was earmarked to run the landfill.

Drisla breaks records

The burning of waste in Drisla is growing dramatically each year, as is shown by the annual reports of the Ministry of Environment and Physical Planning. According to the reports, in 2015 and 2016 besides the collected, there was additional waste imported, which was 20 times higher than the quantities imported in the previous five years.
The amount of waste collected has also increased. For instance, in 2012, Drisla processed 149,737 tons of communal waste, in 2013, when the Italian company gets Drisla under the concession, the quantity is 155,429, while in 2015 the amount of treated waste reaches 172,679 tons.

The figures of burnt medical waste are also growing. Thus, 501 tons of waste were burned in 2012, and in 2018 the quantity was almost twice as high as 989 tons of waste were collected, transported and burnt in the landfill. According to the calculations, given the capacity for incineration of medical waste in the landfill, it turns out that it worked 20 hours a day and earned almost a million euros just last year. And all this in a furnace from last century.

Aleksandra Denkovska