Vardarishte fire is out, 2.5 million euro decontamination next: about 200 people still live on the dump

29 October 2026 1 min read

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Putting out the fire at the informal Vardarishte landfill is finished. Next comes decontamination of the land, and then, if the announcements are to be believed, a park. That's what the independent citizens' initiative "Stop Vardarishte" said after a meeting with City of Skopje officials.

The good news is that measured methane concentrations, according to the initiative, are not high enough to hold up the process. The bad news is that the dump is still not fully stabilised. The main conclusion in the report by the consortium that extinguished the site is that the presence of methane and carbon dioxide shows organic matter is still decomposing.

The decontamination won't be run by the city but by the national government. 2.5 million euros has been approved for it, out of a total of 10 million euros, with the other 7.5 million going to finishing the sewage collector system. The announced contractor is the German company WTE, which is also building the wastewater treatment plant, with a French company due to supervise. The job is meant to cover around 600,000 square metres: digging up and removing the waste, hauling it to the Drisla landfill and protecting the groundwater. Work is supposed to start in mid-November and finish by March 2027.

The design for the future park is being prepared by the public enterprise "Streets and Roads" and should be ready early next year, with a public presentation and a chance for citizens to make suggestions. Construction itself, according to initial estimates, would take seven to eight months.

And here we reach the part nobody puts at the top of the press release. About 200 people still live on Vardarishte, in informal settlements. Their relocation was planned a few months ago, then postponed until conditions were in place. Now come the excavators, the digging and the hauling of waste that burned and rotted beneath them.

They have been promised appropriate treatment and a housing solution. There is no date. If decontamination starts in November and the relocation has no deadline, who is going to explain to those 200 people what they're breathing while the excavators dig up the waste?