Poland will file a case against Germany at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over its alleged failure to remove waste that was illegally transported to Poland, the Polish climate ministry has announced.
“Germany evades fundamental things, like taking care of the environment,” said deputy climate minister Jacek Ozdoba at a press conference yesterday. “We can’t have a situation in which a state, which calls itself pro-European and pro-environmental, transports its crap to another country.”
Ozdoba claimed that there are seven sites in Poland “where Germany is evading responsibility and breaking [EU] treaty policy” by not removing waste “illegally brought there by German companies and which the Germans do not want to take back or finance the clean up”.
He then played a film showing footage of the locations at which an alleged 35,000 tonnes of waste from Germany has been illegally dumped. That amount is the equivalent to 2,000 trucks filled with waste, said Ozdoba.
The deputy minister claimed that the German authorities have not responded to letters from Poland over the issue sent since May last year. Warsaw has therefore decided to file a complaint to the CJEU over Berlin’s “failure to comply with EU regulations”, said Ozdoba.
Poland has in recent years been taking steps to mitigate a large rise in the amount of waste imported to Poland from abroad, some of which has ended up being illegally dumped or even burned.
Between 2015 and 2019, the annual amount of waste brought to Poland from abroad increased from 150,000 tonnes to over 400,000 tonnes, notes fact-checking website OKO.press. In the latter year, around 61% of the imports came from Germany.
However, those figures have since been reduced, and last year was the first time that Poland exported more waste (350,000 tonnes) than it imported (300,000), noted the Chief Inspectorate for Environmental Protection (GIOŚ) earlier this month.
A new unit has been created to tackle the "trash mafia" that illegally dumps and burns waste, which has often been imported to Poland from western countries for processing https://t.co/qvSmEiD4Ni
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) August 12, 2020
Main image credit: Ministerstwo Klimatu i Środowiska/Twitter
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
