For workers in the Communal Hygiene in Skopje, the working day starts at 7 am. Armed in eighty trucks, they start to collect garbage – from plastic bins placed in every yard and from public containers on the streets and boulevards.
Their route is organized, but not waste disposal. In this truck, both plastic and paper, grass, glass, but also large quantities of food – part with expired rock, but also a part of usable, are “milled” at the same time.
Households and companies in Skopje together, about five hundred tons of waste are deposited each day. Annually, one-third of the waste is actually food. And, the state has so far failed to provide a complete mechanism for selecting waste.
The director of the Skopje utility company Rakip Dochi is aware that most of the foods that end up in a bin is usable, but considers that due to the illegal dumping, the communal workers come into decay. Even if it is correct, it will end up at the Drisla landfill, since no one has thought so much about how much food to use in a different way.