Romania has the second-lowest waste-recycling rates in the European Union, yet it has become overflowing with waste and garbage – most of it brought in illegally from abroad.
Is Romania Europe’s New Dumping Ground
Recently, 189 tonnes of waste from Italy were discovered in the yard of a company from Bihor county, in western Romania. The country’s Environmental Guard established that those importing the waste had no facility to recycle it, and it would most likely will end up in illegal landfills.
It is time that all European nations brought a halt to the export of waste and forced the development of domestic treatment facilities. The exception would be if the destination country offered full and proper disposal/ recycling options. There is absolutely no moral case to continue with waste exports.
The Romanian coast guard also seized several containers loaded with unusable waste, shipped to the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta, from various EU member states.
Prosecutors established that a shipment of waste from Portugal had been falsely declared to the customs authority as scrap plastic – but proved to be unusable, and toxic, waste.
Meanwhile, another 25 tonnes of rubber waste had made its way from the UK to the same Romanian port and was seized by customs police.
And another 70 containers with illegal waste, brought to Romania from Belgium, were identified at several other Romanian ports along the Black Sea coast.
Again, goods were falsely declared to the customs authorities as used plastic waste. The police report showed that – despite the documents stating that the cargo contained plastic waste – it in fact contained wood, metal waste and hazardous materials.
The containers had been loaded in Germany, and the goods came from a Belgian company.
And, a week before that, the former head of Port Customs at Constanța was sent to trial over allegations of allowing the smuggling of over 100 containers of waste, shipped from the UK to Romania.
