Romania recycles only "one percent of its waste"

The situation related to recycling and storing waste materials is critical in Romania.

The latest news reported by Eurostat show that, Romania recycles only one percent of its waste materials and that there is no countryside garbage collection systems and little incineration machines.

The Minister of Environment claims that the solution to this issue lies in the hands of local authorities as there must be a way to manage the aforementioned issue.

European officials draw attention upon the fact that even if we make huge efforts to implement a European legislation, there is still an enormous gap between Romania and the other member states.

A great number of people from countryside have not yet benefited from collection systems; the situation is the same regarding the number of garbage incineration, of recycling and manure composting machines.

As for the waste materials management, the rate of European funds absorption is very low as László Borbély, Minister of Environment, asserts.

László Borbély adds that local authorities should come up with a solution for this issue and propose private operators the possibility of bidding without being able to challenge it so the rate of the waste materials management implementation could speed up.

"The solution is in the hands of both local and county authorities who could solve the issue related to the implementation of the system but from different reasons, either biddings or challenge, they have used only one hundred million euros out of the 4.5 billion euro signed contracts."

"Local authorities who worked between 2005 and 2006 knew that they had some responsibilities, such as the actual selective collection issues and they will be fined if they do not select at least fifteen percent of waste materials; obviously many of you noticed how things work in cities as there are some garbage bins on which is written either “paper”, “plastic” or “glass” but sanitation workers come and overthrow each bin in the same garbage truck", László Borbély said.

Minister László Borbély hopes that by 2015 we will have had a waste material management system working in all the counties around the country taking into account that by 2020, in Romania should be recycled fifty percent of the waste materials amount.

Translated by: Cristina Anamaria Maricescu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University