The Balearic Minister for the Environment, Miquel Mir, has highlighted that sea quality will be a key issue for the government over the next four years.
To this end, a new directorate has been established which will be responsible for dealing with spills from land into the sea.
In order to improve water quality and control of outlets, there will be close cooperation between this directorate, another one for water resources, the government’s Abaqua agency and with town halls for municipalities where channels for treated water go into the sea. A further aspect of sea quality is the “fight against single-use plastics”.
Mir noted that these represent 49% of all waste collected by the coastal cleaning service. Under Balearic government legislation, these plastics “should disappear in 2021”. Mir said that this administration will be defined by the climate emergency and its effects on the fragile territory of the Balearics.
This emergency makes it ever more necessary to be conscious of limitations to natural resources, such as water. “We have to reconsider the load capacity that we have and be prepared to talk about limits.”
On other issues, the minister restated a demand for responsibility for management of the coasts to be transferred from the Costas Authority, said that a new water resources plan will be approved by the current government, and explained that a law for environment agents will reinforce the numbers dedicated to forest fire prevention and control.
The mayor of Palma, Jose Hila, has asked Madrid for a meeting with the Minister for Ecology to discuss speeding up the installation of a new sewage treatment plant in Palma in order to stop the beach sewage spills because hoteliers in Palma and the Playa de Palma have had enough.
The Palma and Playa de Palma hotel associations have written to the new mayor of Palma expressing their anger over the continual closures of the beaches at Can Pere Antoni and Ciudad Jardin due to sewage spills into the sea water every time it rains.
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