The almost half-century-old landfill in Velké Chuchle will probably be able to be covered with a layer of clay at the top. The zoning decision should come into force immediately, followed by a building permit. The municipal building department has now rejected an appeal by local opponents against the location of the building. The project is still hampered by a court case.

Not all the land on the landfill site, which was mainly built in the 1970s and 1980s, belongs to Prague. The owners of the plots want the waste to disappear, but the city considers this unrealistic and extremely costly.

The local Klán family, who are running for mayor of Chuchel, sued the capital for the land to be cleared. The dispute is now suspended. “Mediation is underway. We are trying to resolve the dispute amicably,” councillor Jana Plamínková (STAN) said.

It is not clear whether the town is responsible for the waste dumped there, as there are no documents on the creation of the dump. Before it was created, the highest hill in the Radotín-Chuchelský Grove measured less than 300 metres. The top of the landfill is now about 345 metres above sea level. Measurements had previously recorded the movement of the slope, and it was not clear what all the landfill was hiding.

The city has repeatedly rejected ideas to take the waste somewhere due to the multi-billion cost. The landfill was able to be secured, with the exception of private land, in the first phase.

“We have managed to finish the anchoring. The landfill has been refilled and is no longer sliding,” the councillor said.

The second stage involves preventing water from entering. “It needs to be covered at the top, in the crown, with a sealing layer of clay so that it doesn’t leak into the landfill. There should be a sports field for the youth on top, for which there is a project from Satra,” the councillor said.

The clay layer would probably be topsoil with lawns, shrubs, play areas, and tracks with space for dogs.

The city has been trying to reclaim the landfill for a long time, and at one point it even looked like it could use European funds. Plamínková hopes to complete the action in the next term of office, putting the artificial hill in the context of the landscape.

The landfill site was previously investigated by Satra, which calculated that some four million tonnes of non-native material had been brought into Velké Chuchle. There is no shortage of plastics, and small concentrations of heavy metals have also been measured.

The other large municipal waste dumps in Prague are in Libuše and Ďáblice. In the 1970s, during the construction of the Motol Hospital, the Motol landfill also began to be built and swelled to enormous proportions. Waste, mainly rubble and soil, was brought here during the construction of the Blanka tunnels.

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