Are EU funds being wasted in Romania?
Romania received EU funds to close a substandard landfill and implement better waste standards. Since then, little has changed — and no one feels responsible.
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00:00 A Romanian landfill site full of unsorted waste, financed with money from the European
00:08 Union.
00:09 This was supposed to be a modern, environmentally friendly waste dump, to replace the older,
00:14 illegal landfill site near the city of Cluj-Napoca that had been an eyesore for decades.
00:21 The new landfill opened after much delay, but not much seems to have improved.
00:27 Unsorted garbage is still dumped here. Nothing is recycled, a harmful practice that's illegal
00:32 in the EU.
00:34 We want to find out what went wrong here.
00:39 In a residential area, we look at the start of the waste chain. The first impression is
00:44 positive. There are different bins for different waste.
00:47 "Do you guys recycle your waste?" "Sometimes, sometimes it doesn't make sense
01:01 because the same car is taking the garbage, so it's not actually recycling."
01:06 "It's one car to pick everything."
01:10 And then it happens before our very eyes. The sign on the truck reads "Today we collect
01:16 paper", but they also take everything else from all the bins.
01:29 Is this an isolated case, or is it systemic?
01:33 We meet Chandra Kurujfoy, who works in the waste industry. He's also an activist and
01:39 keeps track of what Cluj's waste collectors are doing.
01:48 "So what's happening now again is like different types of waste, right?"
02:01 "Yes, I think they are mixing all the bins, yes, unfortunately."
02:11 Romania recycles just 14% of its municipal waste, compared to the EU average of 49%.
02:18 Chandra Kurujfoy says this partly stems from Romania's fee system.
02:30 "Right now recyclables are more expensive to collect than mixed waste, so there's no
02:35 incentive to collect them separately."
02:47 With Chandra Kurujfoy and three other environmental activists, I watch drone footage of the new
02:53 waste plant. The activists are concerned that the site is filling up faster than it should,
02:59 with unsorted waste, which is illegal in the EU.
03:03 "This is not a momentary mistake. This is structural. As you can see from the area that
03:12 is covered with non-treated, non-sorted garbage, most of the material they don't treat, don't
03:19 sort, just dump it there. It's so obvious."
03:24 From 2014 to 2020, the EU spent 318 million euros subsidizing waste management in Romania,
03:32 40 million in Cluj alone.
03:36 We want to speak with the people responsible for waste collection here. But neither the
03:40 waste company nor the Romanian Ministry of European Investments reply to our inquiry.
03:49 The local waste management association does, however, tell us in writing that they'll impose
03:54 penalties if there are deficiencies.
03:57 The district council here is responsible for implementing the EU project. We met with the
04:02 spokesperson who says Cluj doesn't have a waste problem.
04:09 "We've closed all public, non-compliant landfills and have put both the new landfill and the
04:18 integrated waste management center into operation. That's a definite success."
04:26 We observe that trash is still not being recycled and not collected separately in Cluj. And
04:34 this is one of the main goals of European waste management standards. So are you as
04:41 Cluj county not concerned about this?
04:46 "There may be some isolated problems, but I tell you as a citizen that it's definitely
04:51 not a systematic problem."
04:56 No one appears willing to acknowledge the waste problem here. So we head to Brussels
05:01 to ask what the EU Commission, which financed much of Romania's waste disposal system,
05:06 is doing about this.
05:09 The Commission does not manage projects. We do not follow each separate project. We have
05:14 under cohesion policy the previous period 1.5 million projects or more than 1.5 million
05:20 projects funded by cohesion policy and these are all managed by the member states.
05:25 Back in Romania, no one seems to feel responsible, much to the dismay of Istvan Sococe. He hides
05:33 a surveillance camera near the landfill to track what is dumped. He plans to file a complaint
05:38 with the European Anti-Fraud Office, or OLAF. But he isn't very optimistic.
05:45 "As long as Europe is happy with PDFs, and they are, and they have been, and they will
05:51 be, Romania will have no problem in producing more nice looking PDFs."
05:57 We couldn't find out who is to blame for chaos in Cluj. But maybe that's the root of the
06:02 problem. In the tangle of European projects, everyone wants a piece of the pie. But it
06:08 seems no one wants to take full responsibility for the waste or for where the money is going.
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