On Bonfires outside Bucharest, Waste from Western Europe

Days later, a similar thing happened, this time in the Black Sea port of Constanta, where Romanian authorities refused entry to 15 shipping containers laden with 300 tons of "metal and paper, textiles, rubber, wood, batteries and pieces of asbestos" from Germany.

And that's only the ones that were stopped. The illegal shipping of waste, mainly from Western Europe, to be burned or buried in Romania or Bulgaria is a growing industry, with effects on both the quality of air and the health of the countries' more vulnerable citizens.

Since 2018, when China put in place strict limits on imports of foreign waste, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria have become major destinations for waste exporters in, for example, Germany, Italy and Austria due to the relatively low cost of getting rid of refuse in these countries.

"Communities in these Western European countries do not easily accept that the waste they generate is disposed of in their proximity," said Nicolae Cristian Coaje, a commissioner at Romania's Environmental Guard, a body within the Ministry of Environment tasked with enforcing environmental laws and regulations. "So brokers who send this waste beyond their borders have appeared and have found a new market in cheaper destinations like Eastern Europe."

Columns of black smoke

Among these brokers was Cristian Radu, who went by the name Cristi Baterie [Battery], a well-known underworld figure from Craiova in south-western Romania. He was arrested in Romania in 2018 on suspicion of running a criminal enterprise that imported used car batteries from EU countries to be disposed of in Romania. He was charged with trying to bring in 50 tonnes of batteries, which contain heavy metals and can be expensive to dispose of in Western Europe. The...