Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they were ordered to clean up. This is a popular hazardous substances disposal scheme in EU:

You rent a warehouse/piece of land in Poland claiming to be a transportation/construction/recycling company usually using forged documents or homeless person fronting whole thing.

You get paid to remove hazardous waste from UK/Scandinavia/Germany, you stockpile until the place is full.

Finally you either set the place on fire to cover your tracks, or the owner stops receiving payments, discovers whats stored on his property and decides to take insurance hit instead of having his assets blocked for several years while courts try to figure out if/what/who is going to pay for lawful disposal.

Just 2 days ago https://wielun.naszemiasto.pl/kolejny-pozar-skladowiska-w-na... already mentions one from one week earlier. https://portalkomunalny.pl/gospodarka-odpadami/pozary-sklado... Usually couple a month up to one a week, year after year for the last >10 year. Seemingly no political will to fight this scheme.

*Maybe they were ordered to clean up.*

I would love to believe that would be the case as it would show there was some effort given, no matter how bad the implementation was. Unfortunately, Kuwait is ran by decade-old mass negligence that runs from small institutions/businesses all the way up to the government.

I think the funniest thing happened about this situation is that we never knew about the fire but from the international media picked it up THEN the local media picked up on it. It's even more comical when you realize how tiny Kuwait is.

Source: A Kuwaiti.

Or if you're more conscientious, you ship it to China instead. Then, of course, one day COVID hits, China closes its borders and your green, eco-friendly, carbon-reducing recycling facility grinds to a halt because the plastic keeps coming but you can't ship it away.

> Or if you're more conscientious, you ship it to China instead

Are you seriously claiming that the Chinese government is better than the Polish government at making sure this kind of trash is handled correctly?

I feel this must have been sarcasm, probably related to how sending plastic to a recycling facility was just as likely to end up in the ocean thanks to China buying it off of recycling dealers (for ballast IIRC, can't send all those cargo ships back empty)

It wasn't sarcasm.

No, it actually was. Source: I wrote that comment.

Okay, seems like it was hijacked. My comment ("Are you seriously claiming that the Chinese government is better than the Polish government at making sure this kind of trash is handled correctly?") is currently at -4.

Your sarcasm meter is likely broken I'm afraid

In Poland this has been going on for years. It has nothing to do with China and covid.

>Then, of course, one day COVID hits, China closes its borders

I doubt China closed its borders to cargo because of covid.

China stopped accepting most recycling waste in 2019 before COVID hit.

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/750864036/u-s-recycling-indus...

In other news, landfills in Romania have legal issues and waste disposal companies can't afford to do their work with the revenue from government contracts because the EU decided to mandate 50% waste recycling and high standards for landfills. So waste gets dumped on the streets and landfills operate illegally.

Sometimes high standards for environmental protection obviously have the opposite effect of their intent.

The Schengen area shouldn't have been expanded so rapidly, IMO.

Btw, what we in Scandinavia mostly read about is the constant flow of stolen goods to e.g. Poland and neighbouring countries. This was interesting to read about.

I can't imagine that borders would prevent this kind of dumps.

The difference is that when the borders were still up illegal goods movements were detected more frequently, but most of this waste movement is and was perfectly legal under EU single market rules. The 'four freedoms' explicitly spell this out.

This brings up the whole Multi-speed Europe thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-speed_Europe

Regardless, anyway you view it, these dumpings are a failure of the particular way the current EU has been implemented. There were other options.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Schengen had a lot more effect on the border checks for people than it did on the border checks for goods, which were next to non-existent already.

And at the same time not. Schengen abolished border checks for vehicles passing national borders.

Border checks for goods were not next to non-existent pre-Schengen. They caught a lot of stuff. At least in Sweden.

Those were spot checks at best. The amount of internal goods traffic within the EU is astounding, you're looking at 10 million tons per year.

I actually ran the numbers, napkin style, a while ago. I think an efficient border control was happening, and still could be happening soon, if we were to re-implement it.

I was looking at whether it would be financially prudent for Sweden to start up border checks again to stop the flow of stolen goods out of the country. The conclusion was a clear yes.

I believe it and can you show the numbers?

The amount of intraeuropean libel is truly outrageous. Such things are often presented without much context and comparison to crime inside the particular country and other misdeeds such country allows for. For example we in Poland often read about Scandinavians ruining the fish in Baltic sea by fishing way above their qoutas and getting away with it, without replenishing the fish population. I'm sur Scandinavians could say sth on their defence, but most media don't bother to double check the facts on each side because sensationalism and strengthening stereotypes get more eyeballs.

Did you already forget what my comment was commenting? It was literally just one step away.

Yeah that shit's like "made in China = bad" by now. But I'm not surprised northern countries keep "reporting" on it.

Oh no, we found a dozen servers and power tools in some Polish guy's car, must be stolen, they can't afford to buy them second hand!

Jesus wept.

Reminds one of the Polish, (but globally applicable) pre war joke, re-made during the communist era: "How could you allow your warehouse to burn down, empty!?"

the joke would be that you should claim that the actually empty warehouse burn down full, to claim insurance on the content, right?

that reminds me of a rumor that I heard about the Atlantic Conveyor (UK merchant ship carrying military equipment sunk during the Falklands War): many military units claimed their equipment was on the ship (and thus lost), presumably to get replacements, that in the end the ship was supposed to carrying more supplies than its capacity

Over capacity and negligence on the part of someone who was supposed to check that are fairly good reasons for a legitimate vessel with too much stuff to get lost.

More plausibly everyone claimed what they should have been shipping, good luck proving who over-claimed and under-shipped.

I think there is also a similar story told in Chickenhawk, which is Robert Mason's retelling of his Vietnam war experiences. It may be that he presented it as a rumour too though. Off-topic: I enjoyed Chickenhawk much more than I would have expected from the synopsis. This random person on the web here (me) highly recommends it!

Same happening in Romania

Now the tires, next time will be the car batteries

Aren't car batteries quite valuable and heavily recycled.

Yes, but they usually break them up first, releasing the reactive, lead heavy acid into the ground. The lead itself is packaged and shipped, leaving the plastic casing and acid in the ground. Used to be normal practice for scrap yards the world over.

this is sad

Why not just formalise the whole system and ship the waste to waste-to-energy plants?

This waste is very toxic and very expensive to dispose of properly. Hence, Polish gangs make a ton of money by charging western industrial clients for properly disposing of their toxic waste, and then just dumping this waste wherever in Poland. There were probably hundreds of cases of discovered illegal toxic waste dumps across Poland in the past years (and who knows how many were not discovered yet). Just in one recent case, the city of Sosnowiec will have to pay around 20 million euros (a non-negligible part of the city budget) to dispose of waste left in one lot by some gang.

Fortunately, Polish authorities are slowly catching up to this and are creating special police units dedicated to fight this kind of crime.

Hah, classic "green" countries.

Gulf State places aren't good places to live in if you are a migrant worker

If you only have a small amount of hazmat you find someone who's renting storage trailers and pay them cash, fill the trailer(s) and then drop off the face of the earth.

If you just have tires you can make a pile visible from the road. Given enough time some teenagers with a flare gun will make them go away.

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