14:31 26/08/2021
After China, Romania is hit by illegal waste imports
While traditional waste collection destinations such as China have closed their doors to the EU's waste, the bloc's wealthier member states are sending it to the former communist east. The result of this massive shift of garbage from the west is a huge increase in solid waste pollution and environmental degradation in Central and Eastern Europe.
The European Commission is currently in the process of revising the bloc's waste transport rules, which date from 2006. The revision aims to force member states to make it easier to recycle waste within the EU and transport it to third countries. more difficult.
However, although this may seem like a positive development, experts fear that stricter control over shipments to third countries could lead to an increase in the export of waste to member states within the EU. The EU is generating too much waste and cannot deal with it, therefore, this often low-quality waste is being sent to countries with lower wages and weaker environmental protection, where they cause environmental and social impacts such as Turkey, Malaysia or Indonesia.
According to the European Commission's Directorate-General for the Environment, the EU exported 1.5 million tonnes of plastic waste, mainly to Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and China, in 2019 alone. Shipments labeled as containing recyclable materials have been found to contain waste unusable and dangerous to Western companies have shown themselves ready to pay significant sums of money, as well as cooperate with organized crime groups.
The problem is particularly acute in Romania. There, the environment ministry had agreed with the police on a number of methods to restrict the access of certain products in Romania, to scan the trucks, see what they contain and compare the findings with official documents.
Border police at the Sud Agigea port near Romania's Black Sea city of Constanta found several containers loaded with illegally imported waste from two organizations based in and around the capital Bucharest.
The shipment's documentation claimed it contained only recyclable plastics, but it was also found to contain wood, metal and hazardous waste such as batteries. The containers were found to have been stockpiled in Germany by a Belgian company. Similarly, Poland - which already receives the third largest amount of waste from the UK after Turkey and Malaysia - has also seen an increase in shipments of waste from within the EU.
While Austria, Germany and Italy have all been accused of not doing enough to prevent illegal exports to Poland, Germany was the origin of 70 percent of the trash heading to Poland with nearly 250,000 tons of waste a year for its eastern neighbor.
Clan News
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