At least 675 hazardous industrial waste trucks are illegally dumped into the environment each year, according to official documents from the competent institutions in both entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation of BiH (FBiH).
Any waste that contains excessive concentrations of toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, or irritating substances is considered dangerous, but also one that is highly corrosive or flammable at 55 degrees Celsius.
“Hazardous waste generated on the territory of RS is a big problem, because for the most part this type of waste ends up in landfills together with municipal waste,” the Waste Management Strategy in RS for the period 2016-2025 states.
The situation is similar in the FBiH, where less than 10 percent of hazardous and non-hazardous industrial waste is adequately disposed of. The rest is disposed of on unprotected land in the area of industrial plants or is inadequately incinerated, according to the Strategic Study on Environmental Impact Assessment from May 2022.
Namely, the company “Eurosjaj” from Konjic, about sixty kilometers southwest of Sarajevo, is among the hundreds of producers of hazardous waste in BiH. The company employs about 260 workers and deals with surface protection of metals by painting, and galvanizing.
Jasmin Badzak, director and majority owner of the company “Eurosjaj”, despite the promise to the journalists that he will answer the question about how much hazardous waste the company produces annually, how they dispose it of, and who controls it and how often, he did not do that.
Both private sector and civil society interlocutors say the system looks better on paper than in practice.
“Here, there is no an environmental agency to monitor such things. We should have a system where polluters would enter data on these things, such as emissions and hazardous waste, which should be public,” said Anes Podic of the Sarajevo-based Ekoakcija association.
