There are about 300 illegal dumps in the Sofia Municipality alone, located on agricultural lands, municipal and state territories. A team from “This Sunday“ on bTV has checked some of these areas together with the Deputy Mayor for Environment of the Sofia Municipality - Nikolay Nedelkov.
Tires, tiles, sofas - these are some of the garbage we find in the illegal dumps. The first point is in Dolni Bogrov. We go to the place - right in the area of the lakes.
“This is the area of the lakes, which fall under the protected area, part of “Natura 2000“. We are currently on municipal land, which until recently was polluted with a fairly large amount of waste. After I ordered its cleaning, within about a week we managed to clean the area, we also installed video surveillance“, explained Nikolay Nedelkov.
After the cleaning, only one violator comes.
The discarded garbage has reached 160 tons from one area alone.
“Some of the areas are private and we cannot order cleaning in private areas, because after all, the municipality works with public funds, with public resources and can only clean territories that it owns and is its property. When private areas are polluted, it is the owner's responsibility to prevent both the pollution and the cleanup afterwards“, explains the Deputy Mayor for Environment of the Sofia Municipality.
This is the case in areas around the lake, which are polluted with tires, tiles and other types of construction waste.
We also go to another area - again in Dolni Bogrov.
“Everything was in waste. And this has been accumulating for years. It can't be done in one year or two. It has been accumulating for more than 10 years“, says Nikolay Nedelkov.
The cleanup took a week.
“If 30 tons were removed from the previous site, here there were over 130. Here there was much more and it was mainly construction waste. There was more household waste there“, says Nedelkov.
There is one small area left in the area that will be cleaned up next week.
„We are now in the last contaminated municipal land in Dolni Bogrov. This is the last municipal site, and we have issued an additional assignment here“, says Nedelkov.
„Although the waste management ordinance allows, there is an order in which this bulky waste can be disposed of, it can be left next to the containers. There is a schedule in which it is collected. As you can see, they still come to such territories that are far from the city, which is incomprehensible to me, given that there is an order in which they can be collected“, explains the deputy mayor.
To Suhodol:
„Here, as you can see, in the distance is the river ravine. All this is agricultural land that uses permits for modeling and land reclamation in one form or another, so that it covers the entire territory, even though they have permits for only individual properties, not for all properties. What we found out the last time with the inspections of the Sofia Inspectorate was that they are filling in land that does not have documents submitted for such modeling,“ says Nikolay Nedelkov.
“The other thing is that the earth masses with which these terrain modeling should be carried out must come from a construction site in “Ovcha Kupel“, which when inspecting construction sites turns out to be already at the stage of laying foundations. Accordingly, the purchase works have been completed a long time ago and there is nowhere for earth masses to come from. You can just see that this mass of earth cannot come from a construction site, no matter how big it is“, he says.
In another place in Suhodol the mass of earth is already at the level of the road.
“We are on a terrain near Suhodolski road, again agricultural land, where at the beginning of 1924 we found that filling activities had begun. Accordingly, the activities continued in 1924 and 1925, and ended in 1925. And they ended after joint actions together with the “Basin Directorate“ and with the municipal police. Then there were signals from the lessee of the dam that the embankments had reached the water surface,“ says Nedelkov.
“As you can see on the other side under the Suhodol customs, there are again such agricultural lands that have been filled in for years. You can see what it looks like now. It is already level“, he adds.
Anyone can get involved in the fight against illegal waste dumping.
“Through the signals submitted by citizens and the inspections of inspectors, but most often from signals. Because when filling begins in a certain place, regardless of whether it is earth masses, construction waste, household waste, people are awake and submit signals. The more signals are submitted, the more inspections there will be. And accordingly, if citizens also get involved by submitting more signals and even by engaging, if they see the violation itself and the commission, it will be recorded in the prescribed manner“, explained the deputy mayor.