Lately, there is hardly a week or a month without a “mysteriously” large fire breaking out in some warehouse full of waste, whose burning releases dangerous chemicals into the air. Even those who are not interested in the issue of waste management in Croatia are beginning to ask how fires may occur so often in these large halls. And yes, let us not forget that these landfills are mostly privately owned. So, while accumulated plastic, tires, and other hazardous waste burn, the media and the public are interested and follow everything. However, when the fire is extinguished, everyone forgets that anything was burned there at all. Because there is always some staged daily political drama (read: Ustaše, Chetniks, Thompson and the like) that is easier to deal with and report on than to investigate the details of a fire in a waste hall. A convenient scheme, many would say. But we in the Green Squad do not forget. We observe, record, and the time has come to speak about some things that no one has spoken about so far. And to more easily explain the current chaos in Croatia when it comes to waste management, we must touch upon the devastation of Croatian forests.

There is no person who has not seen how devastated our forests are. In the Green Squad, we studied and reported these devastations for eight years and unequivocally established that this is a state plan by which excessive logging was planned in papers and documents. After that, they favored private entrepreneurs so that they could produce energy from the wood mass, and those private parties were additionally paid incentives for the production of energy from renewable energy sources in the name of state incentives, which we paid out of our own pockets. After everything, the result is catastrophic. Over the course of ten years, they devastated over 100,000 hectares of forests, created a shortage of wood mass of 20 million cubic meters, worth 1 billion euros. And all of this passed because it was a state plan, and in a state plan, everyone is involved, and everyone covers for each other.

The Falsified Kaštijun Study

And now we come to the main point. Waste management, as well as energy production (power plants) – this too is a state plan. Again, we must take into account that this was not something someone just thought up and will do, but that it is covered by state institutions. And that is actually the biggest problem. When we listen to plans and programs, there are 11 regional waste management centers, there are transfer stations, incinerators… And what is interesting about the regional centers is that most of them do not even have a basic, valid environmental impact study. The first is the Kaštijun landfill near Pula, which has a completely falsified environmental impact study. Of course, when it comes to waste management, the question arises of where to put all that waste. So they sold us the story that they will produce energy, that it will be heat, then electricity… We have come to a situation where today the whole of Croatia is literally buried in waste. Waste is being buried in Croatia, abandoned factories are being bought and waste is being stored there. And the bonus question is – where does so much waste come from?

This is the answer. Namely, in 2013, the import of mixed municipal waste from the EU was approved. Thus, from 2014 to 2021, waste imports into Croatia increased. So in 2021, waste imports were 360 times higher than in 2014. That is 36,000 percent. We import refuse-derived fuel (RDF) mostly from Austria, Italy, and Slovenia. And this is intended for incineration. Let someone explain the logic of things to us – if our state swears and constantly mentions that Europe has modern incinerators, that everything is turbo safe, that everything is wonderful, and produces energy, let someone tell us, for example, why a Slovenian would give us their garbage and pay us to produce energy from it and formally earn money. Where is the calculation, the logic? The source of this data is the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition. These are all official documents. All of this is waste for recovery, meaning we will make energy from it; that is the point.

Pushing Incinerators to the Forefront

In this system of burying waste and importing waste, the first step is the construction of incinerators for energy production. And this plan to build incinerators and obtain energy from waste is again a state plan. Again, it is covered by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Ministry of Agriculture, the State Inspectorate, and so on. Laws are being adjusted, so some permits that they previously had to have for such activities they no longer really have to have; the reins are slowly being loosened so that there will be more of it. And that is where the danger actually lies. Namely, the Government has foreseen all of this to go into privatization. Therefore, waste management and incineration as such. Some private party will invest their money or will not, because they do not do that, but expect us to finance and build the incinerator for them, and then they will produce energy. However, since the private party does not care and is not concerned about the environment or our health, they will not invest in modern, safe, and expensive technology. They care about profit. And the danger of purchasing outdated technology for incinerators is the product of incineration, namely, highly toxic slag. A known example is from Germany, where they buried slag under highways and poisoned the soil, and were eventually arrested. So this will happen. And secondly, even more dangerous, it results in the emission of highly toxic dioxin gas. Dioxin is a so-called landfill gas that cannot be filtered. It comes out of centers, out of all piles of waste, and can only be destroyed by incineration at high temperatures of around 1300 degrees Celsius. And that is expensive technology that a private party will not invest in. And only in that way would we be sure that those gases do not exist.

What do DIOXINS Do to Us?

Those same dioxins to which not only we but also the environment will be exposed are carcinogenic, especially harmful to the liver and lymphatic system; endocrine disruptors (they disrupt hormones and metabolism); mutagenic (harmful to the fetus and reproduction); they are transferred through breast milk to the child; they contaminate the soil, enter the food chain – that is the greatest danger. They cannot be excreted from the body because they bind to fat cells (brain, spinal cord); they cannot be excreted and accumulate in the body. They are so persistent that the half-life is 7 to 11 years, and their toxicity is at the level of nuclear radiation. And continuous exposure means more and more and more, we swallow dioxins for decades. Even small emissions cause long-term bioaccumulation. And it is not about dioxin poisoning the environment outside the incinerator. It rises into the air because there are no filters, travels through the atmosphere, carried by winds, 10 and 15 km around, settles, falls to the ground, and contaminates the soil 15 km away from the incinerator. And you yourself know what that means day after day. That is what we are talking about. Dioxins are the most dangerous poison that humans have ever managed to synthesize. In 1969, by the Geneva Convention, they were classified as chemical warfare agents, as the strongest prohibited poison, after the American war in Vietnam. When the Americans wanted to eliminate the Viet Cong, they completely poisoned them and the entire environment with dioxins. In just the first year after that poisoning, about 4 million people died from the consequences. And all other accompanying mutagenic, horrific things are still happening today, 50 years after the war, still, because they are genetically transmitted. Malformed children are still being born…

We bring the continuation of this text in the next blog, and until then, remember the following:

1. Croatia must ban the import of mixed municipal waste
2. We must not allow the construction of large incinerators that will be privately owned
3. About incinerators, if we will even need them for our needs at all, we will decide ourselves, at the level of local communities, and build only those with the most modern technology
4. Local waste management must be restored