Hundreds of tonnes of illegal waste will be transported from Jirikov in north Moravia, and Brno-Horni Herspice back to Bavaria within ten weeks, and the German side will pay for the transport, Czech Environment Minister Petr Hladik announced yesterday.
His Bavarian counterpart Thorsten Glauber confirmed the removal of approximately 500 tonnes of waste from both sites in a telephone conversation.
“We both believe that the situation with the illegal waste brought to the Czech Republic without a permit by the Bavarian company Roth International needs to be resolved as soon as possible,” said Hladik (Christian Democrats, KDU-CSL). “Minister Glauber has given me clear guarantees that the waste will be taken back to Bavaria within ten weeks at the latest. We are fully at the disposal of the Bavarian authorities in order to resolve the situation quickly.”
The Upper Palatinate government has ordered the Bavarian company to take the waste back from the Czech Republic and dispose of it properly. As the company has since announced insolvency proceedings, an alternative solution is also being taken into account, the authority said in a press release today.
“This means that in this case, the removal and disposal of the waste would be secured by the Free State of Bavaria,” Glauber explained, adding that the matter should be resolved in the next eight to ten weeks.
The first trucks with German waste arrived in Jirikov and were unloaded in the first half of December last year. The Czech Environment Ministry is seeking the transport of this waste back to Germany. A month later, five more trucks arrived in Jirikov, but they were blocked, so the cargo remained loaded. They have already left the Czech Republic and the waste is back in Germany.
Since last year, over 317 tonnes of waste from Roth International have also been dumped illegally on land in Brno-Horni Herspice.
Hladik wrote on social media yesterday that more illegal waste was located in Krizanovice in the vicinity of Vyskov, South Moravia. “Pieces of clothing, fabrics from cars, as well as municipal waste, mostly imported from Italy, are stacked in the halls of the former agricultural cooperative and outside,” he wrote. “The owner of the waste claims that he wants to recycle it further, but he does not have the appropriate equipment to do so and did not have a permit to import the waste. Now the police and the Czech Environmental Inspectorate are dealing with the matter.”
