Thousands of tons of hazardous waste oil disappear in Serbia each year – through a black market that endangers both public health and the environment. From Vreme.
I was on the verge of stepping into a serious crime – six months to five years in prison, plus a fine. All I had to do was finalize the deals I arranged through Facebook and solve the heating problem for my non-existent house in Zarkovo.
“This is an original oil furnace, for 350–400 square meters. It used to heat an auto repair shop that the bank repossessed. I bought it at an auction,” the seller of the central heating furnace “for processed oil with all filters” told me. Just 2,000 euros – he says that’s what he paid at the auction.
Of course I was interested – solving the heating problem for a non-existent house in Zarkovo doesn’t happen every day. The furnace seller didn’t have any of that processed [waste] motor oil for sale, but he advised me: “You can buy it, whoever has a repair shop will have it.”
I didn’t even have to go to a repair shop. I found another ad – a man selling waste motor oil. He asked how much I needed. He priced a 200-liter barrel of waste oil at approximately 60 euros, and delivery to Zarkovo would cost approximately 34 euros.
I thought, more than reasonable. Who knows how much I’d save heating my house this way – if it existed. My family and I would probably start falling ill, and soon enough die from lung cancer, but oh well.
Just in case, I also posted a question in one of the Facebook groups – asking if anyone was selling waste oil. Within half an hour, I already had three offers.
It’s lucky for both me and my potential business partners, the would-be traders, that I stopped there.
“Anyone who, contrary to regulations, transports, processes, disposes of, collects, or stores such [hazardous] substances or waste shall be punished by imprisonment from six months to five years and a monetary fine,” says the Criminal Code. And in the previous example, we had transportation, disposal, collection, and storage. Enough for several years in prison – at least that’s what the law says.
But … even though waste oil is hazardous and can pollute water, soil, and air, it is freely traded and transported throughout Serbia, and the poor – or those unwilling to pay – heat their homes, production halls, workshops, and similar spaces with it.
How Much Oil Are We Talking About?
Here, we must first call upon the numbers for help. And even the official ones are catastrophic (and outdated); as for the unofficial ones – better to not even mention them. So, if anyone is interested in how much motor oil is on the Serbian market, that data can be found at the Environmental Protection Agency – but for the year 2023. Those are the most recent available figures.
That year, officially, there were 40,311 tons of oil on the market. What happened to that oil? According to official data, a total of 440 tons of this oil was processed, or reused, while 1,660 tons of waste oil was exported.
So what happened to the remaining 38,000 tons of waste oil? The shortest answer is: God only knows. Some was consumed during machine operation, some leaked, some evaporated, and the rest ended up in watercourses, in the soil, and mostly – after being burned for heating – in the lungs of Serbia’s citizens.
The problem, of course, is even bigger: this calculation doesn’t include undeclared – smuggled – quantities of motor oil that end up in Serbia.
And that year 2023 is not an isolated case. Tens of thousands of tons of waste oil “disappear” this way every year in Serbia. And – nothing happens.
From time to time, there are some ad hoc actions, so we learn from the website of the Ministry of Environmental Protection that in 2022, an inspection in Belgrade found “that two auto repair shops used a boiler for heating with waste oil, for which reason requests for initiating misdemeanor proceedings were filed against the responsible persons with the competent judicial body, and orders were issued prohibiting the thermal treatment of waste, with an instruction to hand over the waste oil to an authorized person.”
Additionally, in several repair shops, “irregularities were found in the management of waste motor oils in the form of not having a developed waste management plan, a waste testing report, or the waste is inadequately stored and not handed over to an authorized waste management entity. It was also determined that some repair shops do not keep records of waste generated and transferred, nor do they have a designated responsible person for waste management.”
Such inspections are enough for the system to function, aren’t they?
We wanted to ask someone from the Ministry of Environmental Protection about this. We also wanted to ask whether they carried out similar inspections after 2022, what they found, how many misdemeanor and criminal charges were filed, and how those proceedings were concluded. But the ministry remained silent to our questions.
They weren’t the only ones.
The Environmental Protection Agency, the Dr. Milan Jovanovic Batut Serbian Institute of Public Health, and the Serbian Chamber of Commerce also did not respond to Vreme journalists’ questions, nor did they want to provide a spokesperson.
But let’s return to the beginning.
Where the Problems Arise
On paper – there are no problems. An importer or producer of oil must pay a fee of 0.10 euros per kilogram for managing what eventually becomes of that oil – hazardous waste. So, the fee is paid to cover the costs of managing waste oil.
How much money is that? The calculation is simple – for the mentioned 40,000 tons of oil in 2023, the fee amounts to approximately 4 million euros. That money should be spent on handling waste oil.
And that’s where the problems begin.
“We currently have no processing of waste oil whatsoever, in terms of re-refining or regeneration, which was previously done by the oil refinery,” says Marko Rokvic, a waste management specialist and owner of the environmental consulting agency Green Group. “The only thing currently in place is energy recovery at the cement plant in Beocin [a town in Vojvodina] – that’s the only thing in accordance with the law, aside from exporting the waste. The money collected through the fee for every kilogram of oil should go to recyclers, but since we currently don’t have any, that money ends up somewhere else, because those who collect or transport the oil are not entitled to the fee.”
So, the money collected through the fee goes into the state budget and is then spent on other purposes, not for what it was collected. Used motor oil can be processed into base oil, which is then reintroduced into the market. However, since such a facility does not exist in Serbia, the only two options for anyone who possesses waste oil are either to transport it to the cement plant for incineration or to export it from the country.
The process of exporting hazardous waste from Serbia has recently become extremely complicated, making that option largely problematic and inaccessible.
This brings us to the next problem. Even though importers and producers have already paid the fee for someone to take care of the waste oil, in practice all generators of waste must pay operators for the removal and disposal of that oil – operators who are licensed for collecting, transporting, and storing hazardous waste.
The operator must be paid at least 0.35 euros per liter of waste oil – smaller operators charge even more – plus 1.20 euros per kilometer traveled. In practice, this means that if an auto mechanic is located 200 kilometers from Belgrade and has generated only one ton of waste oil, disposing of that oil would cost almost 800 euros. And even that is far from the final bill.
By law, all generators who accumulate more than 200 kilograms of hazardous waste are required to have a designated hazardous waste storage area; a waste management plan; and confirmation from a laboratory that it is indeed waste motor oil through a process called waste characterization. They must also keep daily records and submit an annual report to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Generators must pay all of these fees on top of the aforementioned, already-collected fee. They must also organize with their competition to pool their waste and hand it over to the operator together, because, as they tell us, operators won’t bother “messing around” with small quantities of oil.
When, on one hand, we look at an average auto shop, which is just a bit more than a converted garage next to the mechanic’s house, and on the other hand all this overwhelming regulation that the mechanic has to follow, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where those two realities align.
Black Market Operations and Other Workarounds
In contrast to this convoluted system, there is a much simpler possibility – to report less waste oil to the Environmental Protection Agency, and sell the rest “under the table” to guys like me, who want to heat their house in Zarkovo.
“Go, I’ll show you – one big car repair center in Belgrade reports to the Agency that it generates one ton of waste oil annually. But go there and sit for two hours and you’ll see that in two hours he’s done about 10 small services, and in each one he drained 3–4 liters of oil,” says one source. “Multiply that by the number of working hours and days, and you’ll see that he didn’t generate one ton in a year, like he reported, but 30–40 tons of waste oil.”
An even more “elegant” way is simply doing business off the books – you service cars without needing any permits, special storage, or a waste management plan, and you also earn extra income from selling waste oil; let the people figure out what they’ll be breathing.
There are several thousand such illegal garages in Serbia, says Aleksandra Durisic, manager of the association Car Repair Shops of Serbia.
“There are places in Serbia where there are more illegal than legal car repair shops. In some cases we’re talking about small garages, but for example, in the suburbs of Belgrade, there’s a serious shop with six lifts operating completely illegally. It generates tons of waste oil annually, but reports absolutely nothing to anyone, nor is it subject to any inspections, because inspections only monitor registered workshops,” says Durisic, adding that such shops openly advertise and mark their locations on Google Maps without issue.
We’re talking about massive quantities of oil that disappear this way, she says.
“In some people’s minds, this isn’t a criminal offense – a significant number of people see this oil as fuel, and they don’t see any problem with buying, selling, reselling it, even offering to come and buy it from you,” says Durisic. “People say unbelievable things out of ignorance, which shows how urgently education is needed. For example, one man told the police that he wasn’t heating his home with oil, but was using it to lubricate plows for the whole village for farming. Another said he wasn’t the one using it, but had given it to his neighbor to heat a greenhouse. When I heard that, I almost fainted.”
Rokvic, the waste management specialist from Green Group, emphasizes that even if, by some miracle, the black market were to be eliminated right now, there still wouldn’t be a solution for waste oil.
“There are piles of oil just sitting there, nobody’s buying it, nobody’s burning it, our warehouses are full of barrels, and companies don’t want to pay. All we’ve done is collect the waste in many places – but that’s not a solution,” he says. “Several steps need to happen simultaneously. Right now, the export of oil must be enabled through a simpler procedure, because the current system is leading nowhere. It’s already become an economic and strategic question whether we will ever have a facility for processing that oil.”
Authorities Disinterested in Citizens’ Health
Durisic also adds that the fundamental way to address the problem is to restrict the purchase of oil by private individuals.
“It’s fine if you have a liter of oil in your car to top off the engine if it consumes a bit more – but I, as a private person, shouldn’t be able to call up a supplier, some wholesaler, and say I need five tons of oil,” she says. “Everyone will be happy and no one will ask why I need five tons of oil. I’ll even get a bigger discount if I pay in cash. The state must control how much oil someone takes and have some projection of how much of that must be returned.”
According to Dejan Lekic of the National Ecological Association, this case shows that it’s not enough to simply copy or transfer European directives and methodologies for solving environmental issues.
“Everything in environmental protection is done with the ultimate goal of protecting health – but we keep framing it as just some requirement of the European Union. We don’t make the connection that the entire concept of environmental protection was created to safeguard human health,” he says. “Whatever you’ve done with that oil – if you didn’t return it for processing – you’ve seriously polluted the environment and either directly or indirectly endangered public health: from burning it or spilling it into the soil, into waterways, or into the sewage system – you’re not just harming public health, you’re also increasing all costs.”
Lekic adds that we still haven’t learned it’s more cost-effective to address the problem at the source, rather than dealing with the consequences.
“It’s similar to the current campaign to install air purifiers in schools in Belgrade. Instead of asking ‘wait, where is this pollution coming from, let’s figure out how to solve that,’ people say ‘never mind, I’ll just treat the symptoms,’” he says.
And then we return to the beginning of the problem: authorities disinterested in solving it.
It seems that none of the friends, brothers, godfathers, or relatives of very important people have yet figured out how to cash in on this part of the story; if they had, the state would immediately ensure the entire system is harnessed to solve this massive ecological and public health issue to show it does care for its citizens.
Radmilo Markovic is a journalist and fact-checker at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network Serbia, where he has worked since June 2021. He is a two-time recipient of awards for investigative journalism. Previously, he worked as a journalist for the weekly Vreme, as an editor for Nova.rs, and as a journalist for Istinomer.
This article originally appeared in Vreme, a top Serbian media outlet, and was translated by the Association for International Affairs in Prague. Republished by permission.
