On Bonfires outside Bucharest, Waste from Western Europe

On May 12, border officials in southern Romania stopped three trucks loaded with 59 tons of waste trying to enter from Bulgaria. The drivers’ paperwork did not entirely match the contents – steel, plastic and scrap metal – so the convoy was turned back. 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.