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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, even in Europe this is happening at a massive scale. Romanian border checks often uncover dozens or even hundreds of tones of plastic, textile, rubber garbage and e-waste coming from countries like France, Germany and the UK, falsely marked as "recycling" or "raw materials" in the paperwork, which are definitely not recyclable or usable, but will end up in some Romanian landfill operated by some shady unscrupulous business owner who even burn the trash sometimes, causing masive air pollution. I heard the same is happening in other countries, such as Turkey.

It hit me that many rich countries get their so called "green-ness" by paying poorer, more corrupt countries, to offshore their environmental damage, while globally the impact is still the same, but as long as it's not in their back yard, it counts as being green.

https://euobserver.com/news/151622

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> operated by some shady unscrupulous business owner who even burn the trash sometimes,

As a guy living in Bucharest I can confirm that unfortunately that stuff is really happening.

It's kind of crazy when you think about it, i.e. the externality of regularly intoxicating about 2 million people with smoke that has the smell of some chemical trash so that some people further West can check the "we've done our part! we've recycled!" checkbox. All this while literally putting money in the Italian Mafia's pockets, as articles like this one [1] can attest to (in Romanian, but Google Translate can help).

[1] https://psnews.ro/groapa-de-gunoi-de-la-glina-de-la-afaceril...

Yeah, a lot should be coordinated at EU level to stop this practice. For example, if one country finds illegal trash trying to be imported at its borders, then the country of origin should bare part of the environmental fine in order to encourage self policing and environmental responsibility at the source instead of putting all the burden of policing at the poorer target countries since as it stands right now, western EU countries "get greener" by pushing their trash to Romania, and then scold Romania at the European Commission for being too polluted lol.

However, here's a major issue I found in the link you shared (translated to English via DeepL):

"The landfill in Glina [Bucharest, Romania] is a health hazard for citizens and the European Commission recognized this a few years ago. According to the law, landfills must be at least 1000 meters away from people's homes, but the one in Glina is only 70 meters away. The National Environmental Guard has never thoroughly checked the entire area, and there is evidence that hazardous waste may also be hidden there. Underneath the mountains of rubbish that have risen up near Bucharest no one knows what is really hidden and how much damage is being done to the land in that area.

In 2017, environmentalists warned that there was even cyanide pollution at Glina that could reach Bucharest. Prosecutors also opened an investigation after it was discovered that a Romanian company was discharging cyanide waste at the Glina dump, but these cases never reached final decisions because the trials were far too long, bogged down in courtroom proceedings and the facts were time-barred."

The problems I see here are two fold:

One, the Romanian authorities can't be bothered to police what's happening meters away from the capital city, where all the government institutions and politicians are.

And two, it seems like whenever something foul gets uncovered, the Romanian justice system is so incompetent, that nothing happens in the end and the perpetrators get away scot free on technical failures of the system, which only serves to attract and encourage further criminal activity of this nature.

This is a systemic failure on the Romanian side of epic proportions and needs to be addressed ASAP.

It's not just the Romanian system that has these issues. We have similar issues in Bulgaria too. There was some social movement in the past to replace the chief prosecutor, but to no avail. Political parties in the parliament seem to be backed by some financial circles and voting doesn't seem to have any long term effect on the general state of matters (less than 40% voted at all at this year's elections). Non-compliant bottom up/grassroots political movements are dealt with using different tools, ranging from discreditation campaigns in media, to "embrace and extend" and finally brutal suppression using the government power structures.

Same in Poland. And the "landfills" are just random plots of land, often very near high-density areas. The gangsters dump the waste in there, collect the money from their Western clients and disappear before the waste is discovered and police gets involved. Quite often, it's real nasty stuff (very toxic chemicals) and cleanup of one such site costs tens of millions of euros.

> It hit me that many rich countries get their so called "green-ness" by paying poorer, more corrupt countries, to offshore their environmental damage, while globally the impact is still the same, but as long as it's not in their back yard, it counts as being green.

Shit rolls downhill, don't forget that a lot of stuff imported in Romania is produced in China, partially because their environmental rules are even less strict than places like Romania.

In the last decades around here (the Netherlands) they have started burning more an more trash in an effort to stop using landfills, produce energy and to lower the amount of these corrupt streams going through poorer countries. I think some Nordic country even had to massively import garbage as they didn't produce enough.

The global impact is even worse than dealing with it responsibly locally, often severely so.

same in Bulgaria

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