By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Oct 14 2006 (IPS)

Serbia is only now beginning to encourage people to recycle waste, after years of assumption that this is the business only of the government.

“For decades people thought it was the task of state to take care of garbage,” Miroslav Nikcevic, head of the Administration for Environment Protection told IPS. “That was the remnant of decades of communist rule and a decade of little economic activity in the 1990s, but the economic improvement since 2000 has brought the issue into the spotlight.”

Parks, riverbanks and roadsides have long been littered with used plastic bottles and tin cans, a sight often dubbed “the shame of Serbia” by local and international media.

“If nothing was done, Serbia could have been covered with between 130,000 and 200,000 tonnes of plastic waste in three years time,” Nikcevic said. “However, the new efforts to separate plastic for recycling and the introduction of several small plants in the past few years has finally changed the tide.”

The waste has been seen as a remnant of political and economic policy.

Communist rule ended in 2000, with the downfall of former leader Slobodan Milosevic. The last decade of the last century brought international sanctions following Serbia’s role in wars in Croatia and Bosnia.

The sanctions led to almost complete economic inactivity, except in food and electricity production. The situation left no room for environmental awareness. The downfall of Milosevic’s regime and steady development of the economy through foreign investment has brought a new awareness of environmental issues.

The environment is being protected, but at a price. “Serbia has imported granulate for plastic packaging (PET) at a price ranging from 1,200 to 1,400 dollars a tonne,” Gordana Petrovic, head of the Agency for Recycling told IPS. “Bearing in mind just the bottled water production, the bill goes to dozens of millions of dollars a year.”

Domestically recycled plastic costs less than 400 dollars a tonne, meaning significant saving for water plants and other liquid product makers.

The Agency for Recycling is lobbying international donors to finance several big plastic recycling plants, at a cost of 6.6 million dollars each. “With several plants of that kind we could create 5,000-10,000 jobs,” Petrovic said.

So far, 30 of the 180 municipalities in Serbia have started to separate waste, with separate containers for paper, plastic and metal.

“People are reacting in a fantastic manner, it’s really encouraging,” Petrovic said. “Many didn’t know that plastic is not degradable, they are often surprised to discover that it cannot disintegrate for decades.”

There is more awareness of metal recycling, she said. Dozens of small metal recycling plants already exist.

“Metal looks more concrete and more expensive to people, that is why they understood the need better,” Petrovic said. Recycling of metal for Serbia’s industry has already saved millions of dollars, she said.

Some experts are calling for new incentives to encourage proper disposal of long-term polluting products such as plastic.

Petrovic and Nikcevic point out that the experience in neighbouring Croatia has been encouraging. One kuna (less than three cents) is paid for each bottle handed over for recycling. Dozens of thousands of bottles have been collected under this scheme over the past few months.

“Even foreign tourists on the Adriatic coast in Croatia joined the effort during the summer, although there is nothing one can buy for a kuna – a newspaper costs, for example, 15 kuna,” Petrovic said.

Ninety percent of plastic waste is now being collected for proper disposal in Croatia, according to official estimates.

“The effects on people who want Croatia both clean and cost-aware when import of raw material is concerned are encouraging,” Zagreb daily Vjesnik commented recently.

Serbia has found similar success with glass recycling. Over the past six years, two glass recycling factories offering one dinar (0.6 cent) for a glass tumbler emptied thousands of homes of bottles and jars of all kinds.

“There is no glass waste to be seen in Serbia now,” Petrovic said. Glass and plastic make almost 20 percent of waste in Serbia.

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