Two Moldovan villages show there are better ways to treat waste than by dumping it in the forest.
For Dmitrii Mikitenko, it was the last straw, the blow that ultimately turned him into one of Moldova’s best-known, anti-waste activists.
It happened on a Sunday morning six years ago when, hiking with his children near the forest outside their small village, he stumbled upon a garbage dump hidden among lush green hills. It disgusted him.
His move to Riscova from Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, had capped a dream: to go back to his roots, the place where he had spent summer breaks at his grandmother’s, and give his children healthier air than in the city.
But his enthusiasm had soon faded. In Chisinau, Mikitenko brought his trash to a municipal container. But in Riscova, there were no trash bins anywhere. Villagers would get rid of their waste by dumping it wherever was convenient – on the pavement, in the forest, near the lake, or in the big landfill at the entrance to the village.
“People think that from the moment they buy things and produce garbage, the waste doesn’t belong to them,” says Mikitenko, a former professional dancer-turned-graphic-designer. “They just throw it away.”
Mikitenko had developed the habit of picking up whatever litter he stumbled upon. But on that fateful day the presence of his young children prompted him to act. He started by knocking on people’s doors. Why put so much care into maintaining colorful wooden homes but abuse the environment? Hadn’t villagers heard of composting, sorting waste? Many had no clue.
“Then I thought, I have to act, not just talk,” he says.
That’s how, on a sunny day in 2018 during a big cleanup action, volunteers filled up five trucks’ worth of trash, including three loads of just plastic – a ton of it. Dancing and singing around a bonfire capped the day, kicking off another crusade: turn 90 old, empty oil barrels into rubbish bins. Volunteers painted them in bright blue, yellow, and green – for glass and metals, plastic, and non-recyclables – and planted them all over the village./
And now, six years later?
Mikitenko’s action shook up old habits, encouraging residents to pay more attention to the way they sort waste. It was an “eye-opener,” says Aurika Bugniak, whose small grandchildren took part in the cleanup. “I thought people were responsible and cared for nature but was shocked at how much trash they threw away in the forest, along the little river – it was spread all over the place.” At least now, she says, “those places got more or less cleaned up and the trash isn’t thrown on the banks of the river any more.”
The action snowballed, spawning other local initiatives, such as planting trees in former dumps; training on waste offered to locals; and awareness-raising in the village school. “We can’t work with the parents, but we work with the children, and the children go home and tell their family, ‘Mom, we need to put plastic in one bin, paper in another one, and if we have potato peels or other organic waste, we should have a hole in the garden to make compost,’” says Cristina Coada, the school principal.
“All these things our children now know.”
Yet, even though the colorful trash bins blend well with the bucolic flair, Mikitenko’s anti-waste crusade brought limited results. The containers are often bursting at the seams: clothes mixed with food scraps. Some villagers cling to the practice of throwing wrappings on the street. Others don’t want to bother sorting. At some point, rumors about Mikitenko making money out of the bin initiative floated around.
New Green Awareness
“We laid the foundation for waste management in the village,” says Mikitenko, who produced a video about his initiative. “We took the first step, but what’s missing are steps number two and three” – properly sorting waste and recycling whenever possible.
With recycling infrastructure absent in Riscova – and in most villages of this country of 2.5 million inhabitants – waste continues to be dumped, unsorted, into the one legal landfill at the village’s entrance.
“I deceived myself into thinking that if we have bins people will separate plastic from other waste and stop throwing wrappers on the curb,” he says. “That didn’t happen.” At least, he says, people are more careful to deposit their garbage into the right container, “not just anywhere.”
“People are not as lazy or stupid as we think here in Moldova,” he comments. “If they know that their garbage will be recycled, most responsible people will sort their trash. But they know what the situation is in Moldova, so they won’t sort it.”
For many years, residents of this small country squeezed between Ukraine and Romania have been too poor to dealwith sustainability issues. With no waste infrastructure in place, most Moldovans still dump their trash into one of the thousands of landfills dotting this rural country. But Dmitrii Mikitenko’s initiative is a telltale sign of change. Driven by grassroots initiatives, with the help of foreign aid, and the prospect, albeit far away, of EU membership, a new sense of environmental awareness is taking hold in Moldovan villages, and it has reached Chisinau’s national government.
“Fifteen years ago sorting garbage was not even on the agenda for most people. Now I see initiatives on many levels, both locally and nationally,” says Liliana Botnaru, CEO of EcoVillage, an initiative in Riscova that offers training and hands-on assistance with sustainable farming and climate-friendly business models, and which encouraged, and built on, Mikitenko’s waste initiative.
“I have seen small but meaningful steps,” she says, noting the rising interest among schools in training their pupils to manage waste sustainably; villages moving to separate organic waste; and in the cities, “many very small initiatives” – from installing composting bins for a block of flats to people collecting their compost and sending it to local farmers.
A Breakthrough
The 2020 election of Maia Sandu as Moldova’s president marked a breakthrough. A pro-Western, Harvard-educated, former World Bank liberal economist, Sandu “is the first Moldovan politician whoput environmental issues on the national agenda,” says Julian Groeger of EcoVisio, Moldova’s best-known environmental NGO. “She’s not an environmentalist, but she has an ear for it,” Groeger said. “She cannot make a difference as a president, but she can set the tone, set the wording.”
In her four years in office, Sandu has launched an ambitious reforestation program; vowed to cut farmers’ pesticide use in the former “Soviet Garden,” when the communist regime tested new chemicals to reach higher-volume crops; and taken steps to make the country energy independent from Russia, partly by developing renewables.
She has also tackled Moldova’s waste crisis. The finalization of multi-million- euro loans last year arranged by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development injected new vigor into a waste management scheme that foresees waste pickup and recycling for Moldovans by 2028. “The process of integration into the EU will make us more and more committed,” Iordanca-Rodica Iordanov, Moldova’s environment minister until this March, said during an interview at the Environment Ministry in 2023. She then called environmental issues “the most complicated component for the integration process” and underlined the need to “change mentalities.”
“If we ‘re going to be part of the EU we have to improve our environmental situation,” concurs Alexandru Ambros, who as the manager of Moldova’s solid waste project is the man in charge of the national waste plan.
There is a very long way to go.
While weak waste management practices are common in many post-Soviet countries, Moldova lags behind. Only 2% of the 3.98 million tons of waste it produces annually is recycled, compared with 48% on average in the European Union, according to a 2018 scholarly article.
Officials hope that Moldova’s pro-EU course – accession negotiations started in June– could spark change. It did elsewhere. With a zero-waste plan, Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana started roadside pickup of cardboard, paper, glass, and packaging in 2002, for instance. Estonia increased its recycling rate by making it expensive to landfill and economically worthwhile to reuse waste.
Waste Becomes a National Priority
Perhaps the biggest challenge is to change the mindsets and practices around waste shaped by the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, officials say.
In Ambros’s words, “Sometimes people don’t understand why they have to pay. They say: ‘why pay for garbage?’ We say, ‘you’re not paying for the garbage itself but to remove garbage in the right way.’” He knows about the challenge. During his four terms as mayor of Ungheni, a city of 45,000 on the Romanian border, Ambros shepherded a garbage collection and recycling system with the help of foreign money. The national plan he is now responsible for calls for graduallyconsolidating, and expanding the Ungheni model to the entire country.
It’s not that the Soviet Union did not care about waste. It did, out of necessity, explains Irina Anisimova, co-editor of Energy/Waste: Approaches to the Environment in Post-Soviet Cultures, published in 2023 by the University of Bergen, Norway. The USSR’s closed economy produced no plastic bottles. Citizens would wash and reuse their bottles. Taking milk bottles back to the farm and doing communal cleanups fit a certain myth about Soviet life, says Anisimova. But after 1990, “glass bottles disappeared, replaced by plastic, and never came back. This kind of ‘recycling infrastructure’ collapsed.” Plastic, along with Western-style consumption habits, entered Moldova. People generated more waste than the country was able to process. Then, after the “excitement about consumption” came “the disappointment about the economic situation.”
“The environmental movement that had existed in the late 1980s and early 1990s was all swept away by the hardships of the transition,” says Anisimova.
Today, with too few economic incentives to reduce or recycle waste, most Moldovans continue to rely on landfills, many of which lack basic environmental standards. “Moldova does not have norms on how to construct landfills,” Ambros says, adding that Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other post-Soviet countries also lack such regulations.
He says that, often, today’s legal landfills in Moldova and many former Soviet countries are simply holes carved out of old mines or other industrial sites decades ago, at a time when little consideration was given to potential environmental risks, such as rain water washing toxic materials into the ground.
“Today everybody understands we cannot continue, that we need to dispose of garbage correctly,” Ambros continues. The government wants to close the many unauthorized dumpsites scattered across Moldova’s 1,000 villages and replace the legal landfills with new, bigger regional ones that meet EU environmental standards.
A Pioneer
When in 2006, inspired by Western practices, Irina Balica’s father Serghei started ABS Recycling, Moldova’s first private plastic recycling company, he faced a big challenge: getting enough raw material – recyclable plastic – for the company to be economically viable. To deal with the problem ABS Recycling opened its own sorting station whose 200 employees sort about 500 tons of mixed waste each day, mostly from Chisinau. But encouraging residents to separate their waste at home, and put the wet and dry trash into two different bags, remains a priority, says Balica, ABS Recycling’s business development manager. Part of her
job means giving tours of the recycling and sorting plants to school groups, officials, and business people.
“In Moldova, because we are a poor country, citizens have lots of problems, and don’t think about nature, pollution, or health,” Balica says at ABS Recycling’s sorting station in Colonita, near Chisinau. “It’s a challenge for us to educate people, and demonstrate that [sorting and recycling] waste is very important.”
The task is huge, and the role of “role model” initiatives, such as Riscova’s, is crucial, says Nicolae Arnaut, head of the Environment Ministry’s office in charge of implementing its assistance projects. “There have to be more villages like Riscova.”
“We have to meet with all the mayors and convince them to discuss the importance of sorting out waste,” Arnaut says. “But it takes time.”
Growing concern about waste and an interest in tackling the problems around it are promising signs, he says. Another positive development came recently: when his office launched a call for applications for local, environment-linked grants from theNational Environment Fund, 47 of the 107 selected projects dealt with waste. That’s a change: in the past, those grants had typically gone to infrastructure projects, such as water management. This year, grants went to grassroots waste projects such as dump cleanups, installing garbage bins, and awareness-raising campaigns.
Starting from a Total Mess
More than a hundred kilometers from Riscova, on the southern border with Ukraine, the farming village of Volintiri feels far from Moldova’s bustling capital. There is no public sewage, few paved roads, mostly outdoor toilets – and a catastrophic waste situation. “Look at what is being done on our hills!” says Mayor Igor Hincu. “It’s a total mess – those dumps everywhere.” Little wonder, he says, that young people have been leaving in droves.
Hincu became mayor of this village of 2,000 five years ago, pledging to end the endemic clientelism he says had hindered change. He made waste management a top priority. It is now part of Volintiri’s strategic development plan – a thorny, expensive challenge, says Hincu, but also a chance. “We all hear that money can be made from garbage,” the mayor says. “Why are other developed countries taking the route of making money out of trash and we are making fun of it?”
Volintiri tackled the challenge step at a time, with small projects at first. Garbage containers for vendors at the market. Contests for the cleanest streets with, as a reward, roses and trees planted on the winning street. Old plastic tires turned into garbage bins. Boxes to collect batteries. A turning point came during a field trip to Riscova that was meant to provide inspiration from its waste model and other sustainability practices promoted by the EcoVillage there.
“We had read about how they started to sort the waste, and we wanted other people from here to see how they do it,” says Igor Hincu’s wife, Ina, who has been a driving force in establishing waste management in the village. In the fall of 2022, Volintiri hired a truck to begin monthly household waste collection, imposing a 5 lei monthly fee – 1 euro for four people – to pay for the service. A boost came this year when Volintiri won a 2.4-million-lei (about 125,000 euros) National Environmental Fund grant to close and secure illegal dumps.
In this difficult journey, “convincing people why they should pay for waste collection” remains the biggest challenge and requires daily phone calls, Ina Hincu says. “Until then, people were throwing the waste wherever they wanted it, burning it, and it was for free,” she explains. “And then all of a sudden, the municipality comes up with an idea to collect the garbage regularly and force them to pay for it.”
Hincu won a second term this fall, beating pro-Russian candidates. He feels strongly that Maia Sandu’s pro-Western approach will help the village, and the country, deal with its waste crisis.
Locatedon a hill overlooking the village’s blue church next to cornfields, Riscova’s legal landfill offers a sad sight. A cat roams through the trash. After closing down the first dump in 2018, Dmitrii Mikitenko had wanted to tackle the one legal landfill. Volunteers separated the waste, putting it into different plastic bags. The task was exhausting. But during the night somebody tore the bags open and strewed their contents on the grass, the bags gone. “I could never have suspected that somebody needed those plastic bags,” he says.
It was a humbling lesson. For two years, the young father had literally lived with waste. He thought he could change the village. He was wrong. “Nothing will change until something clicks in people’s minds,” he says. “It’s a problem not just for Riscova but for the whole country.”
And yet Mikitenko and a few other committed activists have opened the door, initiated changes in people’s way of looking at waste that are rippling through the country. Cristina Coada, the Riscova school principal, remembers the “plastic hunt” launched after Mikitenko’s cleanup action where the class that collected the most plastic got free pizza. That class graduated this spring, and that gives hope that a new generation of Moldovans will spread the word about the importance of waste management. “The first step was taken,” she says. “Now it’s up to us to build on this project.”
Claus Eppe of Germany’s Senior Expert Services, a volunteer organization that helps countries around the world with the expertise of seniors, has worked in Moldova, Kazakhstan, and other post-Soviet countries, helping villages to work more efficiently. He has visited Volintiri several times since 2020. To him, the establishment of a waste management system is but part of a bigger transformation process that Moldova is grappling with, from a post-Soviet orientation “into a country that develops and uses its strengths to develop village needs in an open, transparent way, using people’s creativity and power.” The challenge, not only in Volintiri and Moldova, but also in other countries with a Soviet experience, is, he says, “to face the perspective and the options of the future efficiently, having the past in mind.”
In Moldova, change toward more sustainable waste management practices is slow, but necessary. “There are steps, but not as far and as fast as some people would want them to be,” says Liliana Botnaru of Riscova’s EcoVillage. “It’s hard for people to understand it is a process.”
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Isabelle de Pommereau is an independent journalist writing for international news outlets such as The Christian Science Monitor, Alternatives Economiques, and New Eastern Europe. Based in Frankfurt, Germany, she often writes on issues around the transformation of ex-Soviet countries.
