They're drilling at the Vardarište landfill. 22 wells have been sunk to capture the waste gases that have been settling for decades under this dump, while the City of Skopje announces that the site will one day become a green park of 300,000 square meters. A pretty picture. The problem is that underneath it, there's still no answer to the most basic question: what exactly is hidden inside.

Samples are supposed to be taken from all the boreholes and tested in certified labs, to pin down the quantity and composition of the gases. The key detail: the results still aren't in. The degassing infrastructure - pipes, shafts, wells - is being installed in parallel, before anyone knows what they're actually dealing with. First you dig, then you find out - the sequence that, on serious environmental jobs, usually runs the other way around.

There are also questions the City is leaving without a clear answer for now. The site is being worked by a company hired for geomechanical testing, but how exactly it was chosen and how much the whole job costs - on that, the City of Skopje has no figure. When it comes to public money and a landfill that has been burning and smoking over densely populated neighborhoods for years, „you'll find out later how much" is not a good enough answer.

Nobody disputes that Vardarište has to go down in history - it's decades of open pollution that should have been shut long ago. But the difference between a real solution and yet another cornerstone ceremony lies precisely in the details that are missing now: hard lab results, a transparent tender, a clear price. A park of 300,000 square meters sounds wonderful in the announcement. Whether it actually sprouts we'll see only when we stop celebrating the boreholes and start reading the results from them.