Serbia’s Informal Waste Dumps

This week we published our Serbia Country Guide, created in collaboration with the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights. Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting some of the unique business impacts in Serbia highlighted by the Country Guide.

In recent years media reports have highlighted the growing problem of informal waste dumping. More than 80 percent of the waste in Serbia reportedly ends up in illegal dumps.

According to evaluation of the Serbian Chamber of Commerce, if containers for the primary waste selection were located throughout Serbia, it would cost about 40 million euros, whereas now it loses 50 million a year because the recycling is not in place. The solution is to open as many recycling yards as possible. Some waste refineries organize waste collection on their own. The problem is that those who have opened recycling plants do not have enough resources. The recycling industry employs about 4,000 people, and it could hire ten times as many.

The European Commission also highlighted this issue in its 2012 Progress Report on Serbia, though its estimates for the scale of the problem differ:

The general state of waste management, waste recycling and safe waste handling in Serbia is poor, reducing public health and causing environmental hazards. Only about 60 percent of municipal solid waste is collected in Serbia (around 2.2 million tons per year). The most acute problem regards hazardous waste (e.g. electronic appliances, chemicals), which is not separately collected but dumped without pre-treatment on regular waste dumps. The industrial waste has increased from 68,000 tons in 1999 to 176,000 tons in 2006 (UNECE, 2007). There are no treatment plants or disposal sites for hazardous waste. Waste disposal sites do generally not meet the technical requirements of sanitary landfills. There are also hundreds of illegal dumpsites of different size in rural areas.

While this may sound like a technical issue unlikely to impact human rights, the European Environment Agency noted in 2010 that some unregulated dumping sites were located in close proximity to communities, and may pose a risk to human health.

Twenty-five landfills are situated within 50 m of a river, stream, lake or reservoir. Fourteen of these are practically located on the bank of a waterway or in its channel. Eleven landfills are situated within 500 m of waterworks zones, and another 28 within 1,000 m.

Not only that, but NGO reports indicate that children and Roma may be employed in the informal sector as waste collectors, putting them in even closer proximity to hazardous waste. Here’s an excerpt from the Serbia Country Guide:

According to NGO reports, more than 50,000 people worked in small-scale waste collection, including many children. The NGO Praxis reported that in 2011 approximately 70 percent of Roma between 15 and 64 were employed in the informal sector, with the most common activity being the collection of recyclable waste materials.

Serbia Country Guide Photo by Flickr user Simaje