Floating Garbage Puts Bosnia's Waste Under Spotlight

After two days of heavy rain, streams running through a municipal landfill, five kilometres from the town of Konjic, overflowed, carrying tons of garbage downstream into the surrounding villages.

“It is very difficult to say how much garbage was washed down... but we are talking about several tons," a member of the emergency services in the southern Bosnian town, Resad Buturovic, told Balkan Insight.

Buturovic said that after the floodwater receded, piles of garbage were left in the villages and also in Jablanica Lake, a part of the river Neretva, dammed for the use of a nearby hydroelectric plant.

An environmental protection group, Zeleni Neretva, said the incident was one of many waiting to happen. "We've been warning the authorities of the danger of having a landfill on a hill above the town ….but they never paid attention,” Amir Varisic told Balkan Insight.

Varisic explained that the dump, set up after Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, was only meant to be a temporary solution, but no lasting alternative had since been found.

“Most municipal landfills around the country are equally unsuitable," he said, "but all authorities are doing is promising that they will sort out the problem with regional waste disposal sites."

Bosnia has been trying to solve its problem with waste disposal for some years, in cooperation with the World Bank. With the help of the bank, the country has established six regional sanitary landfills, designed to cope with nearly 50 per cent of the country’s overall solid waste.

The bank provided 86 per cent of cost of 30.3 million US dollars. Encouraged by the success of the project, the bank launched a second, similar, project in 2008, worth another 43.4 million US dollars.

Once completed in 2014, the further six sanitary landfills should be sufficient for the disposal of all municipal waste in the country. Once they are working, all the smaller landfills will be closed.

"Setting up regional sanitary landfills proved to be the most efficient solution for the problem of solid waste disposal," the World Bank project coordinator, Vesna Francic, told Balkan Insight. "It ensures environmental protection and creates an efficient system in which several municipalities are linked," she added.

Francic said the new big landfills would solve the problem of a large number of municipal landfills, which should all be closed in future.

Environmental groups are impatient for the project to be finished as soon possible. “We don't know when they plan to solve this problem… and while we are waiting for that to happen we are being buried under garbage,” Varisic said.