THE VALLEY OF SORROW

• In Romania there are over 3000 stores and warehouses where used textiles and second-hand clothes are sold. Every week, the country imports between 50 and 100 trucks that bring so-called second-hand products.
• Between 2020-2023, over 125,000 tons of used clothes from Germany arrived in our country. That is half of the total legal volume imported.
• At least three large companies from Jiului Valley are being investigated by prosecutors for illegal import of waste. The firms had environmental permits that claimed textile waste was turned into clothes after a simple manual sorting. In reality the clothes had to be cleaned and disinfected to change their status as waste.
• The Jiului Valley is suffocated by textiles that are dumped in illegal pits. For kilometers the vegetation on the banks of the Jiu River is covered with rags. The impact on the environment is impossible to quantify.
• Although it poses a health hazard, people in poor communities admit to using textiles and footwear to keep warm in winter.

Dozens of plastic sacks and bags are scattered everywhere on the outskirts of Petroșani city. Hundreds of pieces of clothing lie on the ground forming a small musty island surrounded by green grass on which the cows of some peasants graze unhindered. Among the clothes we find municipal waste, brochures, tampons, medical dressings, flags stained in the colors of Germany, but also a non-winning lottery ticket. The smell of damp, moldy clothes mixed with the droppings of animals grazing around is pungent. Breathing next to this illegal waste dump is almost impossible.

“Shoes, second-hand clothes, people use these things to make fire. These clothes are actually wood for us,” explains the man who appears in front of us. Tall, straight and dry as a reed.

For him and many other families in Valea Jiului, textile waste is sometimes a life-saving solution. Firewood is expensive and without a stable family income, the man says two pairs of shoes thrown into the stove help poor families in the valley get through the cold winter nights.

Once the heart of mining, the Jiului Valley is now home to several large companies that have a history of importing textiles from Western countries and overseas. Thousands of tons of scraps that arrive here under the pretext of being second-hand clothes. In reality, many of them are rubbish.

Now, many of these firms are being investigated for illegal shipments of textile waste that were disguised as second-hand clothing imports and brought to Romania.

The Jiului Valley and many other regions in Romania are suffocated by warehouses of textiles and clothes that keep on coming from abroad. A large volume of imported products are of such poor quality that they do not reach the shelves of second-hand stores, but are illegally abandoned on riverbeds, in fields where they are burned, damaging the environment, water and soil. In other cases, large quantities of textile waste were illegally transported to city dumps. The law prohibits the importation of waste to landfill.

After the fall of communism, the economic decline and the closing of the coal mines in the region, tens of thousands of people lost their jobs and with them the income that kept families together disappeared. In no time, the area became one of the poorest regions in Romania, now known as the Valley of sorrow.

“Without jobs, without social assistance, how can one live with 300 lei a month when you have a family, children?” asks Vasile, a 50-year-old man who lives in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Petroșani, also known as the Colony.

He and his family all live crammed into a small house right next to an illegal dump. There we found thousands of mismatched shoes and dozens of plastic bags full of clothes and textiles.

Driven into poverty, most of the locals in the Colony use clothes and shoes in the stoves to make fire in the winter. Wood is too expensive for them. With bitter humor, when talking about clothes, especially jeans, people say that they put “beech wood” on fire. Jeans are in high demand because they burn harder and thus provide more heat than t-shirts and shirts.

“I can’t tell you how many bags I used last winter,” says Vasile as he looks at the houses’ bins. “That black smoke from the chimneys is from clothes and shoes. It smells bad, but that’s it! This is our life!” the man says bitterly, as the gray shadow of the Colony and ruined buildings rises behind him.

The textile waste illegally dumped in the Petroșani Colony comes from the companies and shops that deal with the import and sale of second-hand clothes.

The effect is paradoxical: many of the coal mines have been closed to reduce pollution in the area, but the toxic cloud from the stoves is tolerated.

Next to Vasile’s yard lie hundreds of t-shirts, blouses, shoes, underwear, all mixed with municipal waste (plastic carpets, newspapers, tampons, medical bandages, warning tapes). Most of the products have the same language – German language.

Among the garbage we find an ad from a company that collects waste – We urgently need shoes. We also collect china tableware, glasses, plates, cutlery, bicycles, hand tools. The collection will be next Thursday).

It is an indication that unsorted waste can be found among the bags of clothes that arrived in the country.
“Regarding the proportions, Romania has become a smaller Africa in this trade where the waste is disguised as second-hand ,” explains an environmental commissioner who wished to speak on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. The official estimated that between 15% and 50% of imported textiles are not suitable to be sold as second-hand clothing and are dumped or stored illegally.

The commissioner explained the financial mechanism behind the trade. There are countries where the authorities subsidize the transfer of waste to other states, either because they do not have enough space in the city dumps, or they do not have the necessary facilities to process the waste, or they have the facilities but the processing is very expensive. So, while waste traders make profits, it is the countries where the waste ends up that pay the environmental costs, explained the commissioner who added that for unusable clothes that simply cannot be sold, traders always find a solution.

And the solution is to sell clothes in black bags where low or very poor quality items are mixed with wearable clothes. The contracts with the companies in Romania are signed in such a way that those who purchase the clothing do not see the quality of the products they are buying, nor do they have the ability to return the products.

“The moment the local company opens the bags, they discover the products. The ones where the size is to big are thrown away, like the ones that cannot be used” the commissioner explained.

And this is where the poor population of Jiului Valley have a role, which the second-hand companies use to get rid of the large volumes of scraps. The communities also make a selection after which most of the products are either burned, or end up in illegal dumps, or in the fields or on the riverbeds. And in Petroșani, there is not a single individual that does not know how this business is working.

“The people in that house get clothes from thrift stores because they are not good for sale. The people from those stores give them their clothes and they throw them here,” explains an old woman who also lives in the Colony. Like Vasile and others in the neighborhood, the woman admits that on frosty winter nights she also throws a blouse in the oven.

THE KINGDOM OF DUMAN

Burning clothes can be dangerous to human health because a large part of clothing is made of plastic materials. The most recent studies have discovered the presence of micro plastics in the human body – the gastrointestinal tract, in the blood but also in the lungs.

The Jiului Valley could be a case study. If they are not burned, the clothes are simply thrown in the fields or on the riverbeds of Jiul. Downstream from Petroșani, all the vegetation on the banks of the Jiului River looks like a dumpster for kilometers. The clothes seem to have grown from under the bark of the trees and hang from the branches like gray ghosts.

Jiu River is one of the largest tributaries of the Danube, the second largest river in Europe.

The images of the illegal warehouses in Petroșani and the river banks choked with clothes, shocked Greenpeace specialists, who suggested that the problem of Romania and Eastern European countries is unknown at the international level.

“I think that poor areas in Romania are exploited to the same extent as those in Africa or the Atacama desert. There are rich areas in Western Europe that consume a lot and produce a lot of waste. It is not normal that the solution to the elimination of this waste should be left to other states. It’s a form of colonialism and it’s shocking for me to see these images I can see,” explained Maddy Cobbing, researcher for Greenpeace Germany’s Overconsumption and Detox campaign.

Cobbing insisted on the environmental and health danger in the context of the volumes of textiles dumped on riverbanks or illegal dumps. Most clothes contain plastic and are very difficult to recycle and turn into new products. Over time, all those clothes deposited in the waterways will break down into small particles of plastic fibers that will eventually end up in the food chain, either through water or through the food people eat.

The exploitation of the poor communities for the elimination of textile waste is also mentioned by the commissioners from the Environmental Guard. Jiului Valley is considered the region in Romania with the biggest problems at the national level. Especially because the products arrive here unsorted, which causes a large amount of waste.

“These huge amounts of waste end up being dumped illegally in landfills or simply dumped on the riverbed (the Jiu River is practically choked with textile waste),” reads a criminal complaint against a company that is now being investigated by prosecutors for illegal importation of waste disguised as second-hand clothes.

At least three large companies from the region are now being investigated by prosecutors. All imported textile products from companies based in Germany. Emily Company LTD is one of them and belongs to a local businessman who manages a network of companies active in the second-hand trade

Ion Duman, the owner of the second-hand empire, is described by the locals as an influential businessman. Emily is not the only company connected to the Duman family that is suspected of violating environmental laws. Another company owned by Duman’s brother is accused by the National Environmental Guard of illegal importation of waste. A third company – in which the sister of the Duman brothers is associated – also has problems with imports.

“At warehouses I know they sell big bags, at stores they sell by the piece. I can’t drive you to the warehouses because I don’t want trouble, people know me,” explains a shepherd who admits that poor people in the area sometimes use clothing to keep warm in winter.

The man says that he has also set clothes on fire, but not in the stoves inside the house. The smell of burnt plastic smells very bad, the man says. “I burned them in the mountains where my sheep farm is. That smell drives away the wolves and bears that still wander in the winter,” explains the shepherd.

Over the past few years, Emily’s warehouses have been inspected at least three times by the Environmental Guard Commissioners. Each visit ended with a criminal complaint and a fine of 200,000 RON (the equivalent of 50.000 Euro). The last raid by the state authority was in the spring of this year.

In addition to used clothes and textiles, shipments in 2022 also contained “worn footwear, carpets, quilts, cushions, used or very used leather goods and household goods intended for re-use that the company itself considers waste“, it is written in the criminal complaints of the Environmental Guard, where the commissioners claim that the company does not have the minimum means of processing textile waste according to the law.

The documents provided to prosecutors explain the biggest problem with this trade.

“If products imported from Germany or other Western countries were second-hand clothes according to the law and could be sold as such, this kind of activity would certainly no longer be profitable. In Germany, the disposal of one ton of such waste costs around 500 euros, and in Romania, the disposal of the same amount of waste, at the same type of landfill, costs around 40 euros“, the environmental inspectors wrote in criminal complaints.

An opinion shared by the Greenpeace specialist, who said that in Western European countries sorting is not carried out in depth. Because if that were the case, it would “push the price of clothes up to a point where it wouldn’t be possible to sell them at current prices,” explained Cobbing.

We visited one of the Emily warehouses. When we arrived at the premises, the one-story building was filled to the brim with textiles and other products. On the upper floor, dozens of black bags blocked the windows of the rooms, and inside, on the ground floor, a few women were sorting and packing clothes. Inside we were hit by a pungent smell.

We were greeted by one of the employees. We asked to speak with the owner of the company, Ion Duman, about the criminal complaints and accusations of waste trafficking. “The boss is not available“, answered the employee shortly, after which he invited us to leave the premises.

Most of the textile waste delivered to Emily came unsorted and in a larger volume than authorized. The sender – a company from Germany.

“We set out to recycle clothing and shoes and thus make our contribution to the protection of the environment,” is written on the official website of Baliz Textilwerke, the company that delivered most of the textile waste that Emily Company imported in recent years two years.

The same company from Germany also delivered textiles to the company owned by Duman’s sister, Ideal Magic Adnana, which also chose to file a criminal complaint from the ANPC.

Contacted to explain how the disinfection of the waste was carried out, the cleaning company (which appears named in the disinfection certificates that accompanied the textiles sent by Baliz) claimed that it did not disinfect the textiles, only the containers and boxes in which the bags were loaded. Company representatives added that the bags of clothes were not opened during the disinfection process.

Baliz Textilwerke, the one that sent the textile trucks to Romania, did not respond to RISE’s questions to explain how and if the textiles sent to Romania were cleaned and if the company knew that its romanian partners are being investigated by prosecutors.

In February of this year, Consumer Protection inspectors again raided the warehouses of Emily company, which in the meantime renewed its environmental authorization and was also registered in the register of waste processing companies – ROAFM.

During the raids, the investigators discovered almost 700 tons of clothes in two warehouses. In some cases the textiles were dirty and stained, and the inspectors did not identify the cleaning certificates confirming that the clothes had lost their waste status.

According to investigation documents, three washing machines were also found at the scene, which the company’s employees claimed were used to clean clothes that were to be sold.

Question marks arose when the volume of imported clothes was compared to water consumption, electricity bills and the amount of detergent used. The conclusion was that for 1671 tons of imported waste, only 104 kilograms of detergents were registered in the accounting.

Considering the derisory consumption of water in the period from May to November of 2023 (85 cubic meters), the purchases of insignificant amounts of detergents (104 kg) in 2023, compared to the amount of textile waste that resulted from the documents that he washed it ( 1 671 300 kg) during the period May – November 2023 demonstrates the aspects found during the survey verification of bags with used textile articles or clothing.
The conclusion is, without any possibility of denial, that the products that were put on the market or those that were going to be made available on the market, were not subjected to washing operations.

Consumer Protection documents

The General Commissioner of the National Environmental Guard confirmed the findings of Consumer Protection and explained that during the control at Emily, a lack of mathematical correlation was identified between what was declared as import, what was declared as recycled and what came out finally from the depots.

“I saw an environmental authorization where if one had to do some simple mathematical calculations. The result was that what the company declared it could process in one year, considering the equipment it had, in reality it could have done in 20 years“, claimed Andrei Corlan , the general commissioner of the Environmental Guard.

In a response to Rise, the Emily Company administrator refused to comment on the findings of the latest Consumer Protection raid.

“The document drawn up on this occasion was challenged in court. Until a final decision is made, we refrain from making comments.“

As for the fines and the findings of the Environmental Guard, Ion Duman claimed that all imports came from specialized and authorized economic operators from Germany and that the imports were accompanied by documents attesting to the disinfection operations. And if other types of used products were identified in the imported lots, they were returned to the German supplier.

THE PROBLEM OF MADE IN GERMANY TEXTILE WASTE

According to the latest OEC (Observatory of Economic Complexity) report, Germany is the fourth largest exporter of second-hand clothes after the United States, China and the United Kingdom.

Another Greenpeace report estimates that approximately 1 million tons of used clothes are collected in Germany annually. And this volume is constantly growing

The authors of the report draw attention to how textile waste is often “disguised” as second-hand clothing. Almost half of these exported used clothes “end up in landfills, rivers or are burned in the open. From an economic point of view, only about half of these clothes can potentially be reused as clothing, the rest end up being recycled or thrown away (…) their quality is too poor, or they are torn or dirty and exporting is just a cheap way to get rid of them,” says the Greenpeace report.

The mechanism is almost similar to the one described by the authorities investigating this phenomenon in Romania. According to Comtrade, one of the largest transaction databases in the world, over 125,000 tons of used clothes from Germany arrived in our country between 2020 and 2023. That is half of the total legal volume imported.

The big problem with the huge volume of textiles is that in Germany, but also in other European countries, there is no clear regulation regarding the export and quality of textiles, claims Viola Wohlgemuth, expert in chemistry and pharmacy and former Greenpeace Germany investigator.

“What we know from reports from independent organizations is that only 11 percent of textiles are sold as second-hand clothes, the rest ends up being burned or exported,” explained Wohlgemuth, who added that there is almost no legal responsibility for companies in Germany regarding the quality of exported products.

“It has become commonplace for Germany to send unsorted waste to Eastern Europe because it’s much cheaper,” Wohlgemuth commented after looking at some of the photos of bags with German language written on them at the landfill from Romania.

“Before export, those textiles had to be sorted by industrial categories and only then the fractions that resulted after the selection were to be exported, fractions that could be capitalized on the second-hand market.“

The Jiului Valley is full of places where unsorted textiles lie discarded, and the Petroșani Colony is just one example. We discovered huge amounts of sacks and clothes thrown away in warehouses and halls in Aninoasa, a small provincial town, not far from Petroșani. The buildings, where companies that imported textile waste used to operate, now look like walking dumpsters. A place where stray dogs live sheltered by plastic bags, dirty clothes and garbage.

Among the moldy textiles and clothes we found thousands of plastic bags and pouches, supermarket brochures and books. All in German. And on the walls of a room an inspirational motto “Behave like professionals. Work with professionalism and responsibility. Let your Westernism be felt“.

Those who live near the abandoned building explain that hundreds of tons were illegally transported out of the city and taken to landfills. The documents obtained by RISE Project show that several companies in Jiului Valley have stored almost 100 tons of imported clothes in landfills.

In Romania, it is illegal to store unsorted imported waste in landfills. The country is already at risk of a new infringement procedure from the European Commission due to illegal landfills. More than 54% of waste in Romania ends up in landfills (legal and illegal), which are generally difficult to control and often a source of profit for groups of organized crime.

It didn’t take long and we quickly identified such a place near Petroșani where clothes brought from Germany were unloaded. Dozens of sacks filled to the brim lay abandoned in a place known as Golgotha. A landfill that has officially been closed. Unofficially, textile waste from those who throw away clothes and imported textile waste ends up here.

Most of the bags we found at the site had a message written in German – Deutsche Bundestag – Umweltzeichen – weil aus Recycling Kunststoffen – German Bundestag – ecolabel – because it is made from recycled plastic.

We discover there sealed bags with hundreds of t-shirts, blouses, ties, dolls, pillows, plastic curtains, mismatched clothes. But also a special warning tape that we also found in the Petroșani Colony, a detail that suggests that this waste could have come from the same batch as the one we discovered in the colony.

All are shrouded in ash and smoke, a sign that not long before our arrival on the scene some of the waste was set on fire. Just like it happened in the past with the illegal waste from the Golgotha ​​dump.

Burning is the fastest way to hide waste that has been illegally stored. According to INTERPOL, Romania and the Czech Republic are the countries most affected by this illegal method, where “shipments of waste falsely labeled as ‘for recovery’ actually end up being disposed of or burned“. They burn in the fields but also in the cement factories.

“In Romania, in particular, the cement industry has been notorious for burning waste illegally imported from Italy by companies suspected of being run by mafia groups,” the Interpol report states. Under the pressure of these accusations, some cement factories in Romania announced that they stopped using textiles from second-hand clothing importers.

In February 2022 Thermo Recycling, at the time a partner of HeidelbergCement, sent an address to second-hand clothing suppliers announcing that all contracts would be terminated.

“Because a smear campaign has been launched against our company in the media regarding the fact that we accept to process waste from outside the country’s borders, we are forced to cease cooperation with all our suppliers of second-hand waste. We’re sorry for the situation we’re in, but it’s the only way we hope to have peace.“

The Environmental Guard discovered that Thermo Recycling received textiles including from Emily Company LTD. The company officials wrote in the documents provided to authorities that “all the waste is from Romania, and not imported“. It was untrue information, it is written in the criminal complaints of the Environmental Guard. In reality, most of the textiles came from Germany.

Thermo Recycling SRL is also nominated in an investigation published by OCCRP and RISE Project – Cement’s Dirty Business. The investigation revealed how dealers connected to the Italian mafia signed contracts to deliver illegal waste, which was supposed to end up in the Romanian cement plants.

Roxana Bellei, the representative of Thermo Recycling LTD, confirmed that her company received textiles from most of the companies located in Jiului Valley, accused of illegal import of waste. Bellei said that the notification that was sent to the textile workers came as a result of Heidelbergcement’s requests, after news articles appeared in the mass media incriminating the cement workers for allegedly processing illegal imported waste.

“We were asked to sign that we will not receive waste from outside the country directly for co-incineration (…) I explained that as I am not a control body or customs, I cannot give that statement. So the Heidelberg representatives also gave me the solution, namely to ask for that declaration from every waste supplier.“

According to the documents, during the period 2019-2021, Thermo Recycling LTD received more than 300 tons of textiles from Emily Company.