Waste - State and impacts (Serbia)

 

Poor waste management has been identified as one of the most important environmental problems in Serbia, resulting mainly from previous inadequate approaches. High-costs, low levels of service and inadequate care for the environment are consequences of the poor organisation of waste management. The existing legislation defines local municipalities as the entities responsible for managing communal waste.

Wastes and waste management have been recognised as a major public issue. However, people generally tend to consider wastes as somebody else’s problem, so solutions are expected from the government, its agencies, local authorities, industry, etc. The need for cooperation in solving the problems of waste disposal is only recognised in moments of crisis and public concern.

It is important to remember that waste, per se, represents the loss of materials and energy, and that its collection, processing and landfilling need large amounts of additional energy and labour.

 

 

 

Waste is disposed of in landfills which mostly, except the three newly built ones in Leskovac, Vranje and Lapovo, fail to meet the most basic requirements of hygiene and technical standards, and some of which are already filled to capacity.
To create a national database on landfills, the Environmental Protection Agency set up two projects in 2006 for:

• the establishment of a register of waste disposal sites;

• the establishment of a register of unofficial and old landfills and dumps.

Serbia has 164 landfills that are used by local utility companies for the disposal of wastes (Figure 1). Twelve of these are situated within 100 m of a settlement – highlighting the risks to the local population from contaminating emissions and possible diseases carried by vermin around landfills.

 

 

 

Data on the distance between landfills and water resources give a bleak picture as 25 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.

Waste covering is practised at 117 landfills and is done mostly with earth or some other inert material. Daily covering is practised at 15 landfills, monthly covering at one, and covering is only done occasionally at 101 landfills.

Types of waste discharged into landfills are given in Table 1.

 

 

 

Monitoring of the state of the local environment and possible effects of landfills and their disposed materials on the environment is sporadic.

 

 

 

In the period 2006-2008, the amount of municipal waste generated increased by 30 %. This huge growth is not in accordance with household consumption in Serbia during the same period and can only be explained by better quality of delivered data.

 

 

Illegal dump sites are places where unofficial waste landfilling is performed in previously unprepared locations and more than 3 500 such sites have been identified. This huge number is a result of the level of development of waste collecting systems, because most small settlements, mainly in mountains and isolated locations, are not served by collection systems. Data for this inventory are prepared, using GIS, by the Environmental Protection Agency.

 

 

Industrial waste generation data are collected in the PRTR Register. In 2008, data on generation of industrial waste identified more than 300 facilities generating waste, producing a total of around 5.58 million t, including 0.56 million t of waste without a proper catalogue number.

In the same year, data on generation of hazardous industrial waste identified more than 150 facilities producing around 1.90 million t, but the total may be slightly larger because of data without a waste catalogue number.

The Environmental Protection Agency has no data on packaging and packaging waste, only very rough estimates derived from communal waste composition in 2008. The necessary by-law for reporting was adopted, and the first accurate data will be delivered, in 2010.