The relationship between people and mountains hides a few paradoxes at its core. There's a tension between the majestic natural beauty of peaks and slopes, on the one hand, and the harsh weather that makes life here challenging and labor-intensive, on the other. The resplendent landscape holds huge tourist potential – but tourists will unfailingly leave behind a trail of plastic bottles and protein bar wrappers along the hiking paths.

Managing waste in the mountains is no easy feat and the Carpathians make no exception – on either the Romanian or Ukrainian side. Beyond places that are naturally hard to reach due to their geography, both countries struggle with systemic issues when it comes to trash collection and disposal. These include an underdeveloped infrastructure, low public awareness around the importance of keeping nature clean, and, often enough, a lack of funding for modern waste management solutions.

This cross-border investigation, produced in collaboration with Ukrainian outlet Rubryka, takes us through the Carpathians on both sides of the Romania-Ukraine border to examine how people in three different locations handle their trash. In Romania’s north-eastern Suceava county, a decades-long battle between activists and authorities over an unsafe mountaintop landfill is nearing resolution – but there’s still a long way to go before both locals and their waste are properly cared for. In Ukraine, the Dragobrat mountain resort faces waste disposal issues due to the lack of centralized collection, prompting hotel owners to take matters into their own hands – sometimes illegally. Meanwhile, in northern Romania, the small town of Târgu Lăpuș showcases an effective waste management system, with sorted bins, regular collection and recycling – though it still lacks support from central authorities.

These three distinct cases share common roots – and together, they help us ask what best practices might look like when it comes to keeping our much-loved mountain range cleaner and safer for everyone.

[Editor's note: If you want to skip ahead to a particular chapter, you can use the navigating menu in the upper left-hand side corner of the screen.]

At the heart of Romania’s picturesque southern Bucovina, where a road connecting Europe to Russia meets Romania’s longest hiking trail, locals have been waging a decades-long battle against the development of a garbage dump atop a mountain. The project was deployed without public consultation and poses a threat to public health, the environment and tourism in the area. Its main promoter was local political baron Gheorghe Flutur of the National Liberal Party and president of Suceava County Council until very recently. The project was finished in 2019, a 6-hectare scar on the mountain, but has yet to see any trash, thanks to the vigilance of a couple of activists. New county leadership says they are looking into alternatives for relocating the dump to a more suitable location and redeveloping the unused landfill. 

“What are we going to do about that garbage dump?” “I don’t know, but we have to do something!” Two locals chat while getting water from a freshwater spring in Valea Putnei. “Why should I buy bottled water from the store, when I can get fresh spring water right here, near my home?”, the woman says. Though county authorities recently announced that the long-contested Mestecăniș garbage dump would no longer be used to store waste, residents from nearby villages are fearful that this might still come to pass – after all, this project has been looming over them for 18 years. They know that if the dump does start to take in waste, fresh water sources like this one will be compromised.

“Here,” the local woman tells me, “have one of my bottles to get yourself some water.” I fill up and get back to the car. It’s April, the weather is finally starting to turn around after a bout of heavy snow, and for the past couple of hours I’ve been hitchhiking between Câmpulung Moldovenesc and Valea Putnei in northeastern Romania to meet with two of the activists most dedicated to stopping the authorities from finishing the garbage dump project.

“To me, this has meant years of battle to stop this disaster, half of which has already been built. The other half would’ve been even worse, had they deposited waste here. But the mountain is destroyed, even without any garbage,” says Aristide Maxim-Samuilă, a 68-year old Valea Putnei local, who has been at the forefront of the legal battle against the construction of the garbage dump.

“When my grandkids ask me what I did to stop this, I don’t want to lower my head in shame. Even though the chances of stopping it were slim, at least I knew I wasn’t sitting on my hands at home doing nothing,” says Gheorghe Sologiuc, also known as Solo, a 40-year old man from Câmpulung Moldovenesc, who brought nationwide attention to the controversial case of the Mestecăniș garbage dump. 

It all started in late 2006, when the Suceava County Council decided to replace the county’s outdated garbage dumps with more modern, ecological ones, through the “Integrated Waste Management System in Suceava County” project, partly paid for with European Union money. The old garbage dumps were located along river beds, so they did need to be shut down, and this project envisioned two new landfills for the whole county: one in Moara, near Suceava city, that would take in waste from the towns and villages located in the flatland and hilly areas of the county, and one near Pojorâta, which would collect garbage from the western mountainous parts. For the latter, in 2007 authorities decided on a 9 hectare plot of land in the Mestecăniș Pass, located at an elevation of 1.096 metres. Traditionally, the locals had been using this land for grazing their cattle. This new dump would be active until 2037 and would store an estimated 350,000 tons of waste, including sewage from septic tanks and waste from sewage clean-up.

The beautiful Mestecăniș Pass winds through Obcina Mestecăniș, a mountain range in the Maramureș and Bucovina Carpathians, part of the Eastern Romanian Carpathians (Carpații Orientali). As part of Via Transilvanica, a 1,400-kilometer hiking path that crosses Romania from the North-East to the South-West, it’s a tourist hotspot. Historically, it was known as The Tatars’ Road, as Eastern hordes used it for their 13th century invasion. It is also transited by a segment of the European road that links Vienna, Austria, to Rostov-on-Don, Russia.

“We fought them with their own mistakes”

“Here’s a study by a professor at the ‘Ștefan cel Mare’ University in Suceava, which shows that the mountain is not suitable for such a heavy load of garbage,” Aristide tells me, as he lays some documents in front of me. Stacks and stacks of folders fill his house in Valea Putnei. 

In his 20s, Aristide often won lathe operator competitions. He worked as a mechanical engineer and also taught at the same Suceava university. He retired in 2009 but, in time, trying to stop the Mestecăniș garbage dump turned into something of a full time job for him. He’s been to courts in Suceava, Târgu Mureș, Cluj-Napoca, and Bucharest hundreds of times and has spent countless hours talking to experts, lawyers, politicians, and mass-media.

“We fought them with their own mistakes, the ones that even show up in their documents,” Aristide says. In 2007, when the authorities chose the Mestecăniș Pass as the site of the garbage dump, they had yet to order a feasibility study. Local representatives claimed they chose this place because it was right between the two biggest cities in Suceava’s western mountainous region, Vatra Dornei and Câmpulung Moldovenesc, so it would be the cheapest location to send trash to from the vicinities. But the site came with multiple issues: it's much too close to national road DN17 (a mere 42 metres), two railway tunnels (141 and 166 metres, respectively), and several nearby settlements – the closest house is just 465 metres away. It also sits atop a mountain peak with fairly steep slopes.

Two German companies, C&E Consulting and Engineering GmbH and Louis Berger SAS Poyry Environment GmbH, eventually completed the feasibility study in 2010. Although it contained some inaccuracies, it did highlight several problems with the site and concluded it was not adequate for a garbage dump. The study underlined pollution concerns, such as the strong mountain winds, which would most likely spread waste around, and the negative impact on tourism in the area. Importantly, it noted that the dump is “in or near a water protection area” – the Cîrjoi brook, which runs less than 1 km away from the dump, is protected under EU law as a body of water used for abstraction or local public supply. 

Despite all these warnings, the authorities went ahead with the project. “We were only able to see this study in 2017, seven years after its completion, and we had to ask for it in court. They lied to us and treated us callously,” says Aristide. The actual project of the garbage dump was also kept secret – the locals only managed to get a hold of it in 2020, with the help of the Green Party.

The feasibility study inaccurately states that there is only one home closer than 1.5 kilometers away from the dump, specifying that this is the minimum distance to avoid toxic emission exposure. But another independent study ordered by the locals in 2017 used satellite imagery to show that there are 16 civilian buildings and a farm less than 1 kilometer away, most of them about 400-600 metres away. This was confirmed by local activist Solo, who used a GPS tracker and canvassed the land between the dump and the closest homes.

Another big issue is the landfill leachate – liquid produced by rotting waste, as well as waste-contaminated liquid as a result of rainfall and melting snow mixing with the garbage. The facility at Mestecăniș can only treat 40 cubic litres of water in 24 hours, but strong mountain rains would have generated much more leachate than that. This untreated waste would eventually go down the discharge canal and overflow past the landfill.

This discharge canal ends in the Putnișoara River, the first in a line of increasingly large rivers, which ends up releasing water into the Danube, near the Danube Delta. The waters and valleys along this long river system are home to protected species, such as the European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina), the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), and the weatherfish (Misgurnus fossilis). Part of the Moldova River and the nearby valley was designated a Natura 2000 site in 2022. People have also built trout farms along these rivers, supplying local restaurants with fresh fish. There’s also a groundwater pumping station close to the Mestecăniș Pass, while the city of Câmpulung Moldovenesc gets its drinking water from pumps along the Moldova River. All these bodies of water were under severe risk of waste contamination.

What’s more, the discharge canal is 60 metres away from the railroad, although the law states that rail infrastructure needs at least 100 metres of protection area. Gullies have already formed along the canal due to heavy mountain rains. “There was no erosion here before,” Aristide says.

Because the dump is so close to the railway linking Vatra Dornei to the rest of the country, Suceava county authorities also needed a permit from the Iași branch of the Romanian National Railway Transport Company (CFR Iași). In 2009, CFR Iași, headed by Sorin Flutur, Gheorghe Flutur’s cousin, said that the project was good to go. In 2015, when the railway authority was under different leadership, they gave it a negative permit. In 2018, CFR Iași, under Sorin Flutur again, said that the project was okay.

At first, Aristide and the locals from Valea Putnei, a village of approximately 300 people, less than 2 km away from the proposed garbage dump, tried to appeal directly to the authorities. After six years of petitioning and other forms of civic engagement, despite all their pleas, excavations began. So did an 11-year long legal battle. “Our village is downwind from this site – almost 70% of the time, the winds here blow from the southwest, we would have to live with all the smell coming from the garbage dump,” says Aristide.

On the other front, Solo was pressuring the authorities by filming and social media posts. The first thing he could think of was to climb up a tree and film the excavators digging into the mountain. He then went to a garbage dump in another county, went in and walked across the trash mounds with a gas mask – trying to show locals back home what Mestecăniș might look like in 20 years’ time.

It hasn’t come to that – not yet at least –, but the place has been irreparably altered. The area has been deforested and leveled, so now the heavy mountain rains, freezing, and defrost are causing erosion and landslides. The excavated soil and rocks, dumped on the outskirts of the area, are now slowly encroaching onto the properties of some of the nearby residents. This is also because the incline of is about 30 degrees on the eastern slopes and 45 degrees on the southern side. Add 350,000 tons of garbage on top and you get even more frequent land-and-garbage slides. “What’s gonna happen with that garbage mound when it turns into a wet cake? However much they compress it, it’s not going to be as hard as concrete. The incline will create slip planes and the garbage will go downhill,” says Aristide.

From Mestecăniș to Elbrus

Solo takes me to the now-abandoned garbage dump, guarded only by two Bucovina Shepherd Dogs. Nature is slowly reclaiming the excavated site, with little fir trees sprouting here and there. We circle the place, looking for a way to get in. Some of the land has already started going downhill, taking the protection fence with it. The activist has jumped these fences countless times, for his videos that made people aware of the impending disaster.

During one of his interventions, he found plastic discarded by the workers in the woods nearby. Such garbage dumps are lined with a multiply-layered landfill liner, which includes minerals, gravel, and also a high density polyethylene (HDPE) geomembrane. Although the authorities tried to reassure the locals that they would use a sturdier membrane, the fabric found by Solo on site was only 2 mm thick.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency states that “even the best liner and leachate collection system will ultimately fail due to natural deterioration”. So the toxic leachate at Mestecăniș would have eventually seeped into the groundwater, in an area with several mountain springs.

Solo’s activism began after he returned home from his pharmacy studies in Cluj-Napoca and learned that a local businessman wanted to turn a park into a wedding venue. He inspired some of the kids in town to ‘adopt’ the park’s trees and, through social media, convinced the businessman to drop the project.

He then attended the famous 2012-2014 protests against shale gas extraction through fracking in Pungești, Vaslui County. This was followed by a short-lived tryst with politics, as he ran for the local council. He’s since cut ties with politics and is now handling the family businesses and constantly trying to subvert illegal loggers by calling the Forestry Guard on them. “You can’t actually stop them, but at least they know they can’t do whatever they want.” 

In July 2017, he was part of a six-man Romanian expedition that conquered Elbrus, the highest peak in Russia and Europe (5,642 m). At the summit, they pulled out a banner saying, “No garbage deposits on the top of our mountains! Fight for Mestecăniș!” “This is what kept me going. The weather was really bad, but I didn’t want to give up. I was dead set on reaching the summit with that banner,” Solo recalls. His father, “who used to support me in every stupid thing I did”, later photographed himself with the same banner on a trip to Dubai.

In October 2018, the authorities tried to get away with a secret handover of the garbage dump, but Solo got wind of it. He was an independent Câmpulung Moldovenesc local councilor at that time, but was refused entry. “So I blocked their path with my car and they couldn’t drive in, they had to walk to the site,” he laughs.

In February 2020, he caused quite the public outcry, after filming in the villages by the garbage dump in Moara, where trash routinely wound up in people’s yards. Even in this flat area, at about 350 metres above sea level, occasional high winds of 80-90 km/h would spew trash all around. People got riled up, imagining how much more often this would have occurred at 1,100 metres altitude. “You had plastic all over the place, even though the project stated that plastic should have been sorted beforehand and not end up in the landfill. That’s when the people here really saw what it means to have a garbage dump next to your home. The visual impact from that was more effective than anything else,” says Solo.

A 7-storey tower of trash

In 2018, after years of legal battles with the citizens of Valea Putnei, the Suceava County Council hired the law firm of Valeriu Stoica, three times former Justice Minister and local baron Gheorghe Flutur’s liberal party colleague. Six years later, in April 2024, the authorities won and could finally start using the garbage dump, whose construction had been complete since 2019. But, by that time, the Cluj Court of Appeal had annulled a 2014 Health Minister order, which had allowed county authorities to disregard minimum safety distance measures. Said Order had also been issued a liberal minister.

Gheorghe Șoldan, the newly-elected social-democrat County Council president, says he doesn’t want to go forward with the Mestecăniș garbage dump and is willing to work with experts and locals to find a more suitable spot. Since abandoning the project altogether would entail returning some 7 million euros in funding, he’s trying to get the Ministry of Investments and European Projects to agree to move the dump somewhere else and use the equipment that has already been bought. “We’re still looking for the best solution that would take into account tourism in the area, the environment, but also the cities and villages that do have to take their trash somewhere,” says Gheorghe Șoldan.

Aside from the risk of infringement, the county really does need another garbage dump. At the moment, the part of the county that should have been using the Mestecăniș site is sending their waste to the Moara dump – a very costly procedure, which entails a 200 km roundtrip for the garbage trucks.

Șoldan says he’s also looking into ways of reusing the excavated site, including a farmers’ market for local producers. The activists would also like to see the site transformed. “We were thinking about planting trees in the area. There are lots of ideas, even a nursing home can be built there. Otherwise, who knows what will happen four years from now? Maybe someone else heading the County Council will say, «Let’s actually use the landfill»,” says Solo.

He also suggests that the future dump should be placed at an already ecologically compromised location: „There are a lot of old, unused mines in the area, one could be a suitable place for a landfill.”

“We never objected to the existence of a garbage dump, because it is needed, but it has to be done in a calculated way and adapted to our times. Other countries are starting to get rid of them, because they are outdated, they take up a lot of space and the pollution they produce lingers for hundreds of years,” says Aristide. Using the dump at full capacity would create a 20-meter tall tower of garbage, the equivalent of a 7-storey building, easily visible from the road and the hiking path.

Tourism is one of the few means through which the locals can sustain their livelihood. Aside from this more recently discovered activity, people in Obcinele Bucovinei, a mountainous region with harsh weather, get by by raising sheep or cattle, picking mushrooms, forest fruit, and medicinal herbs – all of which would be greatly impacted by the huge garbage dump atop the mountain.

“It's obviously a bad decision to build a garbage dump in a place with such a high touristic value, one of the most picturesque places in our country, with a lot of potential. And it's not just the landfill itself, it's the thousands of garbage trucks that would have to go there every week, on a road where you're expecting tourists. This sort of infrastructure needs to be planned with the least amount of discomfort in mind, even though this means additional costs. Yes, it's complicated, but, as a political authority, you have to be willing to put in the effort,” says Raul Pop, programs director at the ECOTECA association and former Secretary of State in the environmental ministry.

All these complexities and nuances can be explored and approached by decision-makers bearing the best interest of both people and the environment in mind – in times of peace. But what happens when authorities and locals face the same struggles, against the exhausting and heart-wrenching backdrop of a full-scale invasion?

In what follows, we cross the border to the Ukrainian Carpathians to see how communities there tackle waste management in times of war. 

The problem of garbage collection and disposal in the Ukrainian Carpathians is still open-ended. War, the complexity of landscapes and lack of funding are cited as justifications. However, there is a solution. Further on, we will tell you how they're fighting similar problems in the mountainous regions of Romania. 

Getting to Dragobrat, the highest Ukrainian ski resort, is no easy task. In winter, passenger cars can’t get there and even SUVs struggle, without the help of skilled local drivers. 

The resort, located on the territory of the Yasinyanska community, opened in the late 90s. Back then, it was equipped with several ski lifts and the first guest houses had been built. But even nowadays, to get to Dragobrat, tourists arrive on the morning train and are immediately assigned to "loaves" – UAZ-452 cars from the 60s, and during the next hour they cling with all their might to the handles, the metal seats and each other. 

Skiers and snowboarders are mercilessly thrown from side to side, thrown over seats and onto the floor. Sometimes you need to dodge the backpacks and bags of the passengers in front of you, who fail to hold on to their belongings in a floating car, piled high. If you look out the small misty window of the UAZ, you can see overturned cars in ditches. This is a fairly common picture on the road to Dragobrat. They belong to the overconfident who dared attempt to climb the mountain on their own. 

So, what’s the problem?

If you are lucky enough to climb Dragobrat in the ‘quiet’, non-tourist season when the lifts are no longer working, but the snow has yet to melt, you may encounter roe deer on your way. There are many wild animals here – Dragobrat is surrounded on all sides by the Carpathian Biosphere Reserve. Tourists often pitch tents here to enjoy the wildlife and fantastic scenery. However, sometimes instead of natural beauty they come across landfills.

The resort now includes 86 small hotels at an altitude of 1,300-1,700 meters above sea level. They need to be serviced – firewood and food has to be brought in and, of course, the garbage that tourists constantly produce has to be taken out. However, there is no centralized garbage collection system in place. 

"Each hotel solves the issue of garbage disposal on its own. I take out garbage to the landfill in Rybny in Ivano-Frankivsk, because I live near there [Editor’s Note: he’s referring to Polygon KP in the village of Rybne, Ivano-Frankivsk. Back in 2020, it was reported that this landfill would accept waste only from Ivano-Frankivsk due to the fact that the landfill's resources have been exhausted]. And there are no global solutions. Everyone acts to the extent of their awareness," says Yuriy Sikun, the owner of the Peak Hotel. 

Another resident of Dragobrat, who agreed to comment on conditions of anonymity, is Howard Phillips. Born and raised in Yasinya, he has spent much of his time in Dragobrat, ever since childhood. He knows every path, stream and tree. The resort grew under his eyes. And it also became covered in garbage.

“It's too optimistic to rely on people's consciousness,” says Howard. “One of the hotel owners solves the garbage problem as follows: he has piled tires on a cliff nearby and dumps all the garbage there. He argues that by dumping garbage there, he strengthens the slope... Others burn the garbage – and this is probably the best of the worst options. Everything that can burn is burned, while the plastic, cans and glass are taken to Yasinya”.

But sometimes, according to Howard, hotel owners set the garbage on fire in the street. Plastic, polyethylene, packaging – all of this is thrown onto lawns and set on fire. Smoke creeps up the slopes and enters through windows, spreading a chemical stench. Some estates on the peak accumulate the garbage there. Polyethylene garbage bags tear and the trash spills out and is spread down the slopes, as is the case near the Malva Hotel.

What is the solution?

The best solution for mountainous regions, according to Howard, is to avoid producing unnecessary waste and to choose products with organic or compact packaging. Also – mandatory sorting. Some hotels in Dragobrat have installed tanks for separate garbage collection – organics, glass, plastic, and cans. 

Both sources pointed to two garbage collection points in Yasinya. Dragobrat business owners have two options – either they can bring in pre-sorted waste and receive payment for the recyclable materials, or they can deliver unsorted waste and pay a fee based on its volume, measured in cubic meters (commonly referred to as “cubes”). This fee covers the cost of transporting the waste to the landfill in Ivano-Frankivsk. The two collection points are located next to each other and share a single plastic press.

The first collection point is a project by civic activist Frans Byilo.

His public organization, "Clean Water Clean River", runs a sorting facility. The recycling collection point accepts pre-sorted paper waste, PET bottles, polyethylene, glass, colored and ferrous metals. People can receive money for sorted recyclables.

The second option is the Yasinya Municipal Housing and Utilities Enterprise (MHUE).
To dispose of waste here, the person delivering it must pay a fee. Sorting the waste beforehand is desirable, though not strictly required.

Twice or sometimes three times a month, Yasinya MHUE vehicles follow a designated route through the streets of the Yasinya community to collect waste in marked bags. However, these vehicles do not reach the Dragobrat area: "We don't have the type of equipment that could go up there. But there are a few entrepreneurs – not all – who hire trucks, bring the waste down, and pay for it," says Andriy Vizaver, the director of the utility company.

So, locals do have alternatives for disposing of waste. 

But does this system actually work?

Howard, who also owns a hotel in Dragobrat, has separate waste collection bins in his hotel. But do people use them? According to him, the bins are rarely filled, and sorting quality leaves much to be desired: "They throw banana peels into the organics bin – but in plastic bags," says Howard.

Of all the hotels in Dragobrat, only five use Frans Byilo’s services. A few others bring waste to the Yasinya MHUE. For context, there are 86 hotels at the top of the resort – and nearly all have their own restaurants, which significantly increase the amount of both waste and profit, a small portion of which (just 3,000 UAH, or roughly 63 EUR per truckload) can be used for waste removal.

Clearly, this shouldn’t be the case. According to Ukrainian laws "On Waste", "On the Improvement of Settlements", and a resolution of the Yasinya settlement council, residents are required to sign contracts for solid waste disposal with Yasinya MHUE. Failure to do so incurs administrative liability under the Code of Administrative Offenses.

Yet both Andriy Vizaver and Howard Phillips point out that despite repeatedly contacting the local council and reporting violations to law enforcement, nothing has changed. They say that in small towns, everyone knows each other, and the system of “who’s connected to whom” prevails. Hence, there’s a lack of accountability and no legal consequences that would motivate people to take waste disposal seriously. Local businesses, residents, and tourists lack awareness and a sense of responsibility – and this is the main problem.

The utility company itself faces many problems. One of them is a lack of equipment to remove waste from hard-to-reach places like Dragobrat. Meanwhile, their working conditions are far from ideal. The company is based in an old building. A pile of bagged garbage lies in its yard – that day’s haul from the streets of the community. The bags lie on wet ground, surrounded by puddles and mud, while workers manually sort everything by type – glass, plastic, cardboard.

Workers still do it because the money from existing contracts barely covers salaries. The sorted recyclables are sold by Yasinya MHUE to middlemen for a small sum. These middlemen can collect recyclables in larger volumes and sell them for more, with the money split among workers. "That’s the only way we can currently incentivize people to work," says director Andriy Vizaver.

But even then, profits from recycling are minimal. To sell recyclables at a higher price, large volumes must be accumulated. For example, in order to sell PET bottles directly to manufacturers, you need a truckload of identical bottles.

"To work directly with factories, you need a full truck of one type of bottle. But we have around 40 types. Small businesses like ours can’t work with factories," says Vizaver. Collecting such volumes takes time, and there’s no storage space at the MHUE site. So they are forced to sell to intermediaries at a lower price.

The only solution for small utility companies like this one is to band together, accumulate recyclables collectively, and work directly with manufacturers who accept their specific materials.

"Local authorities now plan to buy a sorting station. But first, we need basic infrastructure – vehicles and storage sheds. That base is essential to build a sorting station and get the process going," Vizaver explains.

The waste issue in the Ukrainian Carpathians is still at “point zero”

Thus, the waste problem in the Carpathians remains unresolved. There’s a lack of structure and coordination among local communities. The Yasinya community can even be considered a relatively positive example. For instance, the landfill in Rakhiv is located within city limits – right on the bank of the Tisza River.

The Rakhiv dump has been the subject of scandals for years. It first came under scrutiny in the 2010s, then once again in the 2020s. Waste lying on the banks of the Tisza gets washed into the river during floods and flows into Hungary, for which Ukraine pays annual fines. Even without floods, wind scatters the waste, and locals sometimes dump trash directly from the riverbank without even taking it to the landfill.

Illegal landfills are also common. For example, within the village of Kvasy, there’s an illegal dump along the railway line and between two mineral water springs. The media reported on it back in 2020, and the local government at the time promised to reclaim the site. Some residents of Kvasy told us that the dump has already been covered up. But Rubryka checked – and the illegal dump still exists.

Given all the aforementioned issues – impunity for violations, lack of awareness and consciousness, a disorganised approach to problem-solving, and indifference – is it even possible to tackle the waste problem in Ukraine?

For a potential answer, we return to the mountainous and hard-to-reach regions in Romania – a country which also faces challenges similar to those in Ukraine. Among those commonalities: corruption, unchecked development, coupled with poor and/or aging infrastructure for waste management, as well as a lack of education of the general public on the importance of properly handling waste. 

And yet, at least one town in Romania’s mountains has managed to improve the way it handles garbage. How did it do it? 

Tuesday is garbage day in Borcut, a village of 418 souls nestled at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, in the northern Romanian county of Maramureș, near the Ukrainian border. It’s mid-April, and the trees and land are just starting to sport their first green leaves. But snow is still falling – the “Snow of the Lamb,” as it's traditionally called, appearing when the lambs are out in the fields. True to its name, in some of Borcut’s yards, lambs can be seen frolicking. But a more common sight in the yards are the black, 65-liter garbage bins, rolled out and waiting for the garbage men.

On this Tuesday, that would be Ștefan Folman, 38, – a skinny but strong guy, who, rain or shine, is out five days a week collecting garbage. It’s not always easy, especially since winters here can drop to -15°C. And thanks to global warming, summers have become increasingly hot, with temperatures above 30°C – once rare in these mountains. Still, Ștefan doesn’t complain. “It’s not that hard. I’d say it’s a pretty good job.”

He rides on the back of the garbage truck, lifting bins and checking whether the contents have been sorted correctly. In Borcut, people not only take out the trash – they separate it, too. One bin for plastic, metal, and cardboard, another for glass, and a third for bio-waste and non-recyclables.

Borcut is one of 13 villages administered by Târgu Lăpuș, a small mountain town that manages to recycle around 50% of its waste – far above Romania’s national average of 12%.

How one town succeeded where a whole country failed.

It all started back in 2009, when the then-mayor, Mitru Leșe, applied for European funds earmarked for waste management. With the money, almost one million euros, he bought three garbage trucks, 5,000 120-liter bins, and around 800 metal containers, distributed them across town, taught residents how to use them – and fined them when they didn’t comply.

“Don’t imagine the fines were large sums,” says current mayor Vlad Herman, Leșe’s political successor. But in a small community where everyone knows each other, the shame of being fined worked better than the fine itself. “It was enough to sanction one person for the message to spread.” Every fine came with a flyer explaining how to recycle properly – what people had done wrong and what not to do next time.

It took a while for residents to grasp the importance of the system, but the local administration says the process was fairly smooth. Sixteen years later, almost no one gets fined anymore. This year, the old metal containers were replaced with new automated electric units that have made everything even easier. Each unit has five compartments: plastic and metal, residual waste, glass, cardboard, and biodegradable waste. They work like this: the resident scans a card issued by town hall, the desired compartment opens, and the waste is deposited. The “eco island,” as it’s called, registers the weight, and notifies town hall when full.

There are 14 such eco islands. At one of them, we meet Roza, a 73-year-old woman local who’s come to drop off her weekly small bag of residual waste. “I live alone, so I don’t generate much,” she says. She keeps chickens, so much of her biodegradable waste – such as potato peels – goes to them. That’s common around here, where over two-thirds of households are detached homes, often with animals. That’s one reason why compost bins never really caught on. “We told people we had compost bins at town hall – come pick them up – but they weren’t really interested,” says Robert Szasz, town hall general director.

Compost isn’t the only recycling innovation in town that didn’t quite catch on. Bins for used textiles were added next to some of the eco islands – but with mixed success. People here don’t really throw away clothes, and when they do, they tend to donate them to local NGOs, which are the more top-of-mind option for the community.

“Târgu Lăpuș and its villages are widely known as a model for best practices in Romania – and that’s because the mayor at the time was decisive,” Raul Pop,  programs director at the ECOTECA association  and former Secretary of State in the Environment Ministry, tells me. “He prioritized the issue, committed extra resources – mainly human ones – and enforced the rules. These kinds of measures are unpopular at first, but in the long run, they transform a community. Taking care of your waste becomes the norm, not just something you do during an environmental campaign.”

Before 2009, when sorting began, the town looked very different. “It was a mess,” Roza remembers. 

And it wasn’t just the town. Now 35, Mayor Herman has only been in office for a year, but he was born and raised in the region and remembers how things used to be. “The simplest example? People used to throw trash into river valleys and clog them. Then the water would flood into people’s yards and fill them with garbage.”

Today, that happens far less often – but people still dump large amounts of garbage in fields and valleys outside the towns and villages. Near Rohia, a village next to the Târgu Lăpuș and home to a famous monastery, you’ll still find garbage bags and construction debris dumped illegally.

Whenever possible, the town combs through the waste to look for clues – a bill, a receipt – to identify and fine the culprits. But they admit they rarely find anything. One possible solution: surveillance cameras at known dumping sites. One such place is a river valley near the village of Inău – a spot that perfectly illustrates the beauty of mountain life and the logistical challenges of managing its waste.

Collecting garbage in the mountains

“When we see garbage just lying around, we pick it up,” says Ștefan, the sanitation worker. But garbage dumped on a steep slope is not so easily collected. We’re standing in a peaceful, silent forest – stop the truck and you hear only wind in the branches and the flow of water in the river. Down in the valley, from the road, we can see white bags of trash scattered all the way to the water. It’s not a huge height difference, but the steep incline, combined with trees, rocks, and mud, means it would take precious man-hours to clear.

“The geography isn’t ideal for sanitation services,” says Mayor Herman. A truck driving to a remote village like Inău burns a lot of fuel to collect very little waste – not nearly enough to make the trip profitable. “That’s why it’s important that this is a public service. We do it for the good of the citizens.”

And the roads aren’t just expensive – they’re also difficult to drive on. “You need a bit of courage,” says Gabriel Pop, the garbage truck driver, as he rounds a tight uphill curve in the falling snow. “And a bit of experience.” Gabriel’s got plenty. He trained as a mechanic in high school and spent decades driving trucks abroad. He liked it, but is now content with his garbage truck – its cab decorated with football cards and religious icons. The route from Borcut to Inău is his most difficult.

In addition to the usual frustrations – slow driving that annoys other motorists and gets him honked at – mountain routes pose unique challenges. Driving a 12-ton car on steep, narrow roads. The snow. A few years ago, on the same road to Inău, he got stuck due to ice and snow and had to wait hours for help. “Winter’s a bit tougher. But the rest of the year is beautiful. Sometimes we stop and have a little barbecue,” he adds.

By the time we reach Inău, the snow is falling harder. With just 221 residents, many homes shut for winter or abandoned, as families moved to the city, the village is quiet. Not many paved roads. Forest all around. The only people outside are the garbage men.
Ștefan doesn’t mind being outdoors – even in snow or rain. At least he never catches a cold, he says smilingly. “I must have built up my immunity.” It’s around -1°C today, and clinging to the back of the garbage truck is cold – but bearable. Since today’s collection is for plastic and metal, the smell isn’t bad. He checks the bins for contaminants, but says most people now follow the rules. Sure, there’s the occasional mix-up – a bit of cardboard or glass in the wrong bin – but usually not that much. Still, digging through garbage isn’t always fun. The worst things Ștefan finds in the bins? Dead animals.

“I just wish people appreciated our work more,” he tells me. “And appreciated us more as people. It’s not an easy job.”

And many in the villages do. “They’re good boys,” Zorica, a 68-year-old woman from Borcut, told me that day. She and her family adapted quickly to the system, and now don’t even think about it – it’s part of their routine. Just like keeping her back- and frontyard clean. “It’s the proper and Christian thing to do.”

In recent years, proper waste management in mountain towns and villages has grown even more vital, as forest fires become increasingly common. Early this year, someone lost their life in one near Târgu Lăpuș. Waste – especially bio-waste like leaves and branches – can help fires spread. 

Our garbage

After the plastic and metal waste is collected, it is brought to the base – the town’s waste management office. They offload the truck and the garbage goes through the final selection process. The plastic is separated by color: transparent, blue, green, and brown, thus making it more attractive for the private recycling company, which no longer has to handle this process. This is done by hand. The garbage rolls in on a conveyor belt and four workers separate the different colors of plastic into different bags. Once the bags are full, the contents are compressed in a baling press.

"The worst thing is the smell.” Dan Mureșan, 62, has worked here for about three years. Because it's winter, the smell isn’t as bad, but the hall is still far from a pleasant place to work. Trash is everywhere. Huge bags of plastic bottles are piled both inside the warehouse and outside, waiting for the larger trucks that will transport them to recycling centers. There are math notebooks on the floor, a sketched portrait, a blue bag. On the wall behind the workers hangs a large, grimy world map. The conveyor belt carries the most random things: a matryoshka doll, plastic wrappers, newspapers, potato peels. Every piece of trash that ended up in the wrong bin shows up here – when it’s too late to trace who did it.

The worst things Dan has found on the belt? "Leftovers, diapers, tampons, dead chickens." He used to get sick from the smell, felt like vomiting. Over time, his body adjusted. Sometimes, he gets nosebleeds. He can’t say for sure it’s because of the job, but the smell definitely doesn’t help. Dan stresses how important it is to sort your trash correctly. “It’s not that hard,” he adds. He believes a good solution would be for regular people to come and work next to him for a few hours. “I don’t think people realize what they throw away. I didn’t either, before I started working here.”

A national solution

The plastic that Dan and his colleagues sort is then sold to private recycling operators, and the money goes back into the city budget. The same happens with cardboard and glass. “It’s beneficial for us to be part of the circular economy because we also receive additional funds and bonuses through the OIREP,” explains the mayor. OIREPs are part of Romania’s waste collection and management system. They act as intermediaries, helping gather recyclables and channeling European and national funds to local actors.

Cardboard quantities have increased lately, “thanks to people ordering more packages,” says Robert Szasz, the general director of town hall. Plastic and glass, however, have dropped – ever since Romania introduced the Deposit-Return System (SGR) in 2024. Under this system, a 50 bani (about 10 Eurocents) deposit was added to plastic and glass bottles. If people return the bottles, they get their money back. The system has proven fairly effective: both urban and rural residents have started bringing back their bottles.

“We’re happy this system was implemented, even though it’s made things more complicated for us, since we no longer have the same quantity of plastic and glass to sell,” says the mayor.

Raul Pop points out that although it may take some time for local administrations to see it, the SGR system offers real advantages. When SGR bottles are collected from a town or city, the company in charge has to report how much was gathered – taking some of the bureaucratic burden off town hall. Another upside: the volume of plastic waste drops significantly. “Empty PET bottles take up a lot of space. Basically, you’re collecting packed air,” says Pop. Packed air fills up bins faster, which means they have to be emptied more often – requiring more fuel, more truck trips, more money. “So yes, they can’t sell that plastic anymore, but they also avoid the cost of collecting it.”

Glass also poses risks. Once broken, it becomes a hazard for the workers handling it.

The SGR system is still a work in progress. There have been reports of broken machines or slow collection in some regions – especially in mountain areas or the Danube Delta – but Pop is optimistic. “Last year, SGR managed to recover 55% of the bottles sold. This year, each month has seen over 80%.” He says he’s noticed a shift in public attitude. In 2024, when his team offered to bring SGR machines to shop owners in tourist areas, the answer was no. A year later, those same businesses are calling him – because tourists are asking for the machines.

SGR has also helped reduce the amount of trash left on tourist trails. “If the person who used the bottle doesn’t come back for the deposit, someone else will. They’ll collect it and take it to the nearest shop,” Pop says. “Unfortunately, this isn’t something that would happen in Ukraine – they don’t have this system.”

What towns can’t do

“We’re not in this to turn a profit like private sanitation companies,” the mayor told me. He believes that one of the town’s strengths is that sanitation services are run by the local administration rather than being outsourced.

But there are things the local administration simply can’t do on its own. One of the biggest problems for Târgu Lăpuș – and the entire county of Maramureș – is that there’s no legal landfill for non-recyclable household waste.

The county has been trying to open one – a site designed to hold two million cubic meters of waste – but the project has been stuck in development for over a decade, blocked by legal disputes and construction mistakes.

In the meantime, all the county’s waste is sent to other counties – some as far as 200 kilometers away. The long journey adds costs to the budgets of cities and villages. It also means trash often sits nearby for longer than it should. “These other landfills weren’t built to cover their own counties and Maramureș,” Pop notes.

Târgu Lăpuș can’t just build its own local landfill either. That would require European funding and a large facility big enough to serve neighboring towns as well. “We don’t have the resources for that,” the mayor says, “and besides, such a project would be very unpopular. The community isn’t ready to accept this kind of activity in our area.” There are benefits – jobs, more money in the local budget – but people mostly see the risks.

This is the well-known “Not In My Backyard” phenomenon, Pop explains. People understand that landfills are necessary – they just don’t want them near their homes. One possible solution, he thinks, is to turn citizens into stakeholders, giving them a financial interest in the project. That’s already happening in some countries, like Türkiye.

Until the landfill is built, Târgu Lăpuș has another project in the works. Just outside the city, with support from county authorities, they’ve constructed a waste collection station – a place where residents can drop off debris, electrical waste, and bulky items for free. The town will also store recyclables there until there’s enough to send to private processors. They even plan to install a freezer for dead animals. The center is expected to open this year.

Târgu Lăpuș and its waste system are constantly evolving. Some changes reflect national trends – like fewer plastic bottles and more cardboard in the recycling stream. Others point to long-standing and new challenges specific to mountain areas: difficult terrain, forest fires, harsh winters.

From the yet unfinished landfill project in Mestecăniș to the precarious slopes of Dragobrat and the clean(er) streets of Borcut, the Carpathians reveal the full spectrum of waste management – from cautionary tales to quiet success stories. Though shaped by different pressures – war and precarious infrastructure in Ukraine, corruption and underfunding in Romania – the core challenges are strikingly similar: hard-to-access terrain, a lack of integrated public frameworks, and a general neglect of public awareness.

Yet the contrast between Dragobrat’s burning trash piles and Borcut’s automated eco-islands shows that change is possible, even in mountainous, resource-strapped regions. The key ingredients aren’t just money or modern machines – though those help – but local leadership, community engagement, and an insistence on long-term thinking, no matter how steep the climb.

As the mountains keep weathering all our excess, they also offer a quiet reminder: there’s no shortcut around responsibility. Whether in peacetime or war, in Ukraine or Romania, the way we deal with garbage tells a much bigger story – about who we are, what we value, and how seriously we take the places we say we love.

Editor: Ioana Pelehatăi (Scena9.ro/Romania).

Main photo by Andrei Becheru.

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.