Polluted air alerts total removal from coal market

Environment and Spatial Planning Minister (MMPH), Fatmir Matoshi, for Online Economy, has said that awareness of citizens has increased, where it has made air quality less polluted.

If you look at statistics even if you look at the statistics that are public, it's easy to notice that the 2019-2020 winter or this time period is obviously better than the periods of two years in advance. I believe that an extraordinary role in this has been played by the awareness of citizens and the raising of this topic to a higher level of discussion that we have always done as Environment and Space Planning Minister”.

And it's never been that we've lost them as a topic, it's not that we've hidden before our citizens the heavy state that we have for air quality in the country, then there's the concrete actions we've taken and that's the ban on coal use in all public institutions”, Matos said.

The practice of years ago, which the Kosovo Energy Corporation (KEK) has rewarded workers with free coal, Matoshi has said this practice has managed to break.

A practice that has been to reward KEK workers who are over 3 thousand employees at the end of the year with 8 to 10 tons of free coal and we have cut it off as well. All that coal has ended in the market and I don't say that we've come to stop completely selling illegal coals, taking this action we've managed to get a huge amount of coal into the streets to sell and magnify”.

I've been looking over and over and over again, and I believe it has to come in order that the Ministry of Infrastructure more implemented administrative directives that have to do with releasing emissions of gas into the air, from vehicles that are on the run and that can also, in the wake of a very positive”, he said of EO.

Another important project affecting the improvement of air quality is the project for changing filters of “Kosovo B”, where funds are approved by the Assembly in the previous legislature. It says this project has cost 78m euros.

For moving slowly to the major project, which is changing the Kosovo B filters that are already approved and approved by the Kosovo Assembly, are within the framework of the IPA, and there are 78 million invested in improving air quality by investing directly in our thermal power plants, in this case in the Kosovo plant B”.

“This is in the process of implementing the project, all procedures in terms of documentation, funding insurance approval, approval by the Kosovo government, the Kosovo Assembly have been completed, and now the EU office will certainly deal with the announcement of the tender for the change of Kosovo's filters, and slowly go to a very innovative project of the Pristina Commission that concerns solar heating for a solar plantation that will be used for heating even to expand the network co-operation in Pristina (4)x> he said.

Another project, according to Matosh, is the extension of the central heating network in many of Pristina's neighbourhoods in order to become unnecessary with the use of coal and other fuels.