‘It’s Devastating’: BIRN Maps Illegal Landfills Blighting the Balkans

Authorities in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and North Macedonia are failing in the fight against illegal landfills; the environment and the public are paying the price.

Arton has only heard stories about the family picnics and days spent fishing on the Morava e Binces, the river that flows through Arton’s village in eastern Kosovo.

“My parents often told me how they used the river for swimming and fishing,” Arton told BIRN, standing on the bank of the river Morava e Binces/Binacka Morava.

There are no fishermen or picnickers now; instead, the river is awash with plastic bottles and other refuse, an improvised and illegal landfill.

Such sites blight the natural and interconnected beauty of Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and North Macedonia, where authorities turn a blind eye on an industrial scale to the careless littering and organised fly tipping that are ruining the environment by polluting groundwater and agricultural land and contributing to methane emissions.

Via on online questionnaire, 152 respondents in the four Balkan countries have identified a total of 120 illegal landfills.

They include the River Drina on the border of Bosnia and Serbia; pictures of a vast plain of waste floating on its surface went viral last year, but the problems has been decades in the making.

Dejan Furtula of the Visegrad Eco Centre said some 5,000 cubic metres of waste gets trapped in the Drina at one spot by an improvised barrier of oil barrels set up by to protect a hydroelectric power plant on the river near Visegrad.

“The waste comes from all sides and the scene is always the same,” Furtula told BIRN. “The garbage is not thrown by citizens of Visegrad but by those who live in the towns upstream, in Rudo, Foca and Gorazde,” he said.

“People feel helpless. The river is poisoned, it affects fishing, and it makes it impossible to use the river for tourism. It’s devastating.”

Finger of blame pointed at authorities

Images of illegall dump in Radinovici, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: BIRN

The BIRN survey showed that a vast majority of people do not believe the authorities in their country are doing enough to tackle the problem of illegal landfills; most are aware of the threat to the environment and their own health, but very few are prepared to report illegal landfills to the authorities.

Of 30 respondents in Albania, most said they know of illegal landfills near their own home.

In some cases, the authorities are directly responsible: in Nedici, near Breza some 30 kilometres south of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, the local municipality has been operating a huge waste dump as a transfer station en route to the regional landfill, despite not having a permit. The dump is polluting the surrounding forest and the River Stavnja and encroaches on the R-444 road.

“Garbage from this landfill is occasionally hauled away but the problem has been going on for 15 years,” said Mirnes Ajanovic, a local councillor in neighbouring Vares municipality and a vocal critic of the dump.

Due to repeated violations of the law, Breza municipality is unable to obtain a permit for the construction of a municipal landfill, further complicating efforts to close down the operation in Nedici.

In Albania, it took the commitment of activist Majlinda Hoxha to instigate a volunteer clean-up of Dajti mountain, a popular walking spot overlooking the capital, Tirana.

Hoxha and other volunteers cleared the worst areas, where rubbish had been tossed at the sides of the road and into streams.

“I contacted a few relevant people [in government and the Tirana municipality] in 2022 and offered my help to voluntarily engage in drafting a strategy on waste management, but I saw there was no interest in cooperating,” Hoxha said.

Just 10 kilometres away in Priske, another illegal landfill was reported by respondents to the BIRN survey. Both locations are within the boundaries of Dajti National Park.

In 2014-2017, the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama vowed to tackle the problem with garbage incinerators, built via a string of ‘public-private partnerships’ that have become notorious for the level of corruption involved.

Rama’s former environment minister, Lefter Koka, was sentenced to more than six years in prison in September last year on corruption charges concerning a waste incinerator in Fieri, while the month before prosecutors seized the company behind the construction of another waste facility in Tirana, saying it was a front for two fugitive businessmen and that its corrupt dealing had cost taxpayers at least 100 million euros.

Need to raise awareness

Images of illegal dump in the village of Pogragje/Podgradje/Kosovo. Photo: BIRN

North Macedonia has 57 official municipal landfills, but only one – Drisla, near the capital Skopje – operates in accordance with national legislation; the rest fall short of the minimum technical requirements.

Littering is widespread, whether at roadsides or in national parks.

In her winning campaign for election in 2021, current Skopje mayor Danela Arsovska promised to clean up the capital’s landfills in 82 days “and revitalise the area into a clean, green area”. But there has been no visible improvement since.

Civil society groups say much of the problem lies in a lack of information; the authorities must do more to raise public awareness, they say.

“The pollution that people do to the environment, making it unliveable, is mainly due to lack of information and the careless and irresponsible behaviour of people,” said Biljana Kostadinova of the Skopje-based environmental NGO Zero Waste.

The lack of information concerns “the harmful consequences of improper disposal and treatment of waste for human health and the quality of the environment, and in terms of knowing what services are available for citizens to do it easily and correctly”, Kostadinova told BIRN.

According to the European Environment Agency, very little of waste generated in North Macedonia is recycled; regulation of waste management is the responsibility of local municipalities, but in 2019 waste collection services reached only 78 per cent of the population.

Scale of problem underestimated

Illegal dump near Skopje, North Macedonia. Photo: BIRN

Kosovo’s eastern Gjilan/Gnjilane municipality spans just 525 square kilometres, yet local authorities have identified more than 50 illegal landfills. The true number is almost certainly higher.

The municipality told BIRN it had closed nine such landfills in 2022 and 2023.

In the capital, Prishtine/Pristina, the municipality said it had removed “more than 200 small, illegal landfills” inside the city and on its outskirts. Five large illegal landfills were also shut down last year. Five large illegal landfills and two smaller ones remain, the municipality told BIRN.

Ferizaj/Urosevac municipality in the east said it had identified 15 such sites ad has installed cameras at landfills they have shut down.

Activists say the problem is far greater than suggested by official figures.

“Often, public reports do not include all locations of landfills identified and reported by volunteers, especially those in remote areas and where rubbish is thrown into rivers,” said Luan Hasanaj, a member of ‘Let’s Do It Kosova’, which organises volunteer clean-up events.

Illegal dump in Linze, Albania. Photo: Fation Plaku

According to Hasanaj, there are more than 1,000 illegal landfills in Kosovo, one of the smallest countries in the Balkans, often affecting rivers.

“The large number of illegal landfills in Kosovo shows that the management of garbage remains a huge challenge here,” Hasanaj told BIRN. “A key problem is the lack of categorisation of illegal landfills… This makes their monitoring and treatment more difficult.”

Kosovo’s Ministry of Environment, Spatial Planning and Infrastructure did not respond to a request for comment.

Djordje Stefanovic, director of the Dinarica Association in Bosnia, said river pollution was particularly worrying.

“Although the regulations strictly prohibit the disposal of waste in waterways, waste in our rivers and streams is a reality and a constant phenomenon,” Stefanovic told BIRN. “We are not talking about isolated incidents”.

“It is enough to see the waste that is carried by the rivers during higher flows or the amount of waste that is stuck to the vegetation that is located directly next to the watercourse.”