Andrei Ciurcanu Romania is a target for those who want to get rid of waste quickly, but pretend to export second-hand products. While businessmen prosper, communities, the environment and the state budget suffer.
Three years after China’s ban on the import of waste, Romanian prosecutors, specialized in investigating environmental crimes, discovered in February 2020 in the port of Constanța 16 containers loaded with waste from Great Britain. In the documents were second-hand products. In reality it was waste.
This was the beginning of a long marathon of criminal complaints against Romanian companies that work with foreign companies to bring second-hand products into the country, but which in reality are mostly waste. In the case of clothes, textile waste.
This type of illegal import quickly became a problem investigated by the control authorities in Romania. A confidential 2022 Home Office report, obtained by the RISE Project, highlights that some EU member states no longer have viable waste storage capacity, having to choose between processing it domestically (at very high cost) or trying to dispose of it store/transfer in Romania.
The reason? In our country, waste storage costs are 10 times lower than in Western European countries. The enormous difference could turn Romania into Europe’s garbage dump, claim the prosecutors investigating this phenomenon.
“In most EU member states and the UK, the storage price is around €500/tonne. The high environmental costs imposed by some states or those caused by recycling/recovery operations, where the wage level greatly increases the level of expenses, determine, in certain cases, a higher return. Following the legal or illegal trade of a mixed/unsorted waste,” the confidential Ministry of Business report says.
Waste trafficking has also come under the scrutiny of the Romanian Intelligence Service, which, in a 2020 report, drew attention to the fact that the phenomenon is connected to money laundering and the repatriation of funds.
The reports of the Environmental Guard estimate that in Romania there are around 3000 warehouses and shops where second-hand products are sold, which come from Western European countries and beyond. Imported textile waste is sold as is, without being sorted, cleaned and disinfected as required by law. An environmental bomb and a biological one, according to the environmental inspectors who agreed to speak with RISE reporters.
According to those from the environment, every week between 50 and 100 trucks full of so-called second-hand products enter Romania. That means between 2800 and 5600 tons of products that are brought to Romania every month from over 20 European countries and overseas. Only some of these imports are checked. For most products, traceability is almost impossible.
The illegal import of textile waste disguised as second-hand clothing has become such a big problem for Romania that the authorities involved decided last year to amend the legislation to make it more difficult for organized criminal groups in this illegal trade.
Some areas in Romania are strongly affected by the illegal storage of textile waste. The waterways are choked with damaged clothes that cannot be sold because they are dirty, torn and damaged. Hundreds of tons also end up in landfills, although it is illegal to store imported waste here. In some poor communities textile waste is used to heat houses during the cold season.
Burning clothes and shoes is dangerous to human health, because a large part of clothing is made of plastic materials. The latest studies have discovered the presence of microplastics in the human body – in the gastrointestinal tract, in the blood, even in the lungs.
The images of the illegally stored waste and the environmental impact in Romania shocked international experts, who claimed that our country is facing the same problems as the states on the African continent, which are suffocated by the huge volume of exported textiles.
In recent years civil society has been bombarded on the news with images of prosecutorial raids, searches and thousands of tons of clothes being confiscated.
Despite this worrying phenomenon, sources from the control authority claim that the rate of convictions in court is discouraging. And that the magistrates do not see the social or environmental danger, and the big cases announced with pomp by the prosecutors have turned into soap bubbles.
The Romanian state does not have a register of companies that import second-hand products, in order to keep under control the phenomenon of the import of waste disguised as second-hand products.
