The waste treatment plant in Shishmantsi village, about 20km east of Sofia, is 80 per cent complete and should start operation in the summer, the deputy mayor of Plovdiv Petko Atanassov was quoted as saying by Stroitelstvo Gradut weekly.

Construction is expected to be completed by May 30, and all testing procedures would need no more than 30 days, he said.

The project, launched in 2003, has triggered plenty of controversy over the years. The plant has received 24.8 million leva in state funding and then a further 17 million leva at the end of 2008, which are now being used to finalise construction.

Although Shishmantsi is in the Rakovski municipality, the Plovdiv city hall owns 51 per cent in the plant, with the rest held by the consortium of forms picked in 2003 to build and operate the plant under a 30-year concession.

The city hall became the majority shareholder after the Cabinet conditioned funding for the project on that.

The plant is on a 22.3ha parcel of land, on the site of a former steel plant. The production technology is be supplied by the French Techem, the first phase of which envisaged the erection of the corpus for recycling and the assortment of different kind of waste, glass, metals and paper, and their subsequent treatment and refining. 

The plant is yet to receive a permit to start operations. According to current legislation, the Environment Ministry cannot issue a permit to consortiums, so a subsidiary has been set up to apply for one, with Plovdiv municipality owning 33 per cent and the rest split between two firms from the consortium that built the plant.