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BELGRADE: As blistering summer heat sweeps across the Balkans, poorly managed and illegal dumpsites are bursting into flames, sparking wildfires and smothering towns and cities with toxic smoke.
The municipal Golo Brdo dump, deep in the lush forests of southeast Serbia, burned for days after it ignited under the scorching sun in early July.
In the small town of Lukare, about seven kilometers (4.3 miles) from the blaze, the air became foul and unbreathable.
Local children were kept indoors for fear of the deadly diseases that many people nearby already suffer, resident Haris Ibrahimovic told AFP.
“Honestly, no one cares whether we’re exposed or not,” Ibrahimovic said, frustrated by the inaction and poor monitoring by the local government.
This fire was just one of hundreds of blazes that have torn through parts of Serbia since the start of summer.
Authorities said many fires started at landfill sites, where the improper disposal and management of waste is a long-standing issue.
Although Golo Brdo is a government-run site, Ibrahimovic said what is dumped there was “absolutely uncontrolled,” and it caught fire several times since opening in 1999 — each time burning for around two weeks.


When piles of organic waste aren’t stored properly, they can create pockets of methane that ignite under intense heat and burn through the dump’s readily available fuel, Aleksandar Jovovic, professor at Belgrade’s faculty of mechanical engineering, told AFP.
Jovovic said the issue had grown over decades, and fixing it would mean reforming the entire waste management system to sort and process trash safely.
According to Serbia’s environment ministry, less than half the country can access just a dozen properly managed, or “sanitary,” landfill sites.
Most waste instead ends up either at an unsanitary site like Golo Brdo, with the unsorted trash piles described by Jovovic, or in one of the 2,500 illegal dumps.
The issue is region-wide, with research by Lloyd’s Register finding that Balkan households separate their trash at the lowest rates in the world.
According to the 2024 poll, in Kosovo, less than 20 percent of households separate their trash. Montenegro, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Serbia all closely follow in the rankings, with households recycling at rates lower than 40 percent.
The impact of poorly managed waste extends far beyond those near a dump, Ibrahimovic said.
Fumes from last month’s fire reached two cities around 10 kilometers (5 miles) from Golo Brdo, while the runoff into a local river is “literally black.”
“We have a series of cases around the landfill where people are getting lung cancer,” he said.
“We’re not claiming that it’s all because of the landfill, but it certainly has an impact.”
Former director of the World Health Organization’s European Center for Environment and Health, Elizabet Paunovic, said that the impacts of garbage fires on local communities were well-documented.
These blazes belch toxic gases, leach microparticles and pump heavy metals into the atmosphere, while fumes from burning plastic were “highly toxic,” Paunovic told AFP.
For people living nearby, these toxins, which can cause congenital disabilities, will often go unnoticed due to poor monitoring by authorities, she said.


Balkan nations, bolstered by foreign investment, are intensifying their efforts to address waste management, but they still lag behind the rest of Europe.
In 2021, Belgrade’s Vinca, then one of Europe’s largest open dumps, was redeveloped.
Elsewhere in the region, new landfills are planned or have recently opened.
In response to the series of fires at landfills this summer, the government asked local authorities to increase monitoring as an emergency measure.
But progress remains slow, often hindered by aging infrastructure and a lack of accountability.
In Albania, three long-promised incinerators never arrived, despite millions of euros invested in a project now mired in corruption allegations.
At the proposed site, mounds of garbage burned for almost a week in June, blanketing parts of the nearby city of Elbasan in noxious fumes.
“The way this waste is managed is a real corruption case that goes against all the functional safety standards,” local environmental expert Ahmet Mehmeti said.
Around 20 people have been charged in a vast scandal linked to the incinerators, but little has changed at the landfill sites.
For those like Ibrahimovic living in the shadow of smoke clouds, promises to fix or even close landfill sites are not new — he said authorities first vowed to close Golo Brdo in 2018.
After years of protesting, including by blockading the dump, he is now preparing a lawsuit to force change.
“It can only be closed on paper, not through agreements, not through promises.”

ROME: An independent UN investigator and outspoken critic of Israel’s policies in Gaza says that the sanctions recently imposed on her by the Trump administration will have serious impacts on her life and work.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, is a member of a group of experts chosen by the 47-member UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. She is tasked with probing human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories and has been vocal about what she has described as the “genocide” by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.
Both Israel and the United States, which provides military support to its close ally, have strongly denied that accusation. Washington has decried what it called a “campaign of political and economic warfare” against the US and Israel, and earlier this month imposed sanctions on Albanese, following an unsuccessful US pressure campaign to force the international body to remove her from her post.
“It’s very serious to be on the list of the people sanctioned by the US,” Albanese told The Associated Press in Rome on Tuesday, adding that individuals sanctioned by the US cannot have financial interactions or credit cards with any American bank.
When used in “a political way,” she said the sanctions “are harmful, dangerous.”
“My daughter is American. I’ve been living in the US and I have some assets there. So of course, it’s going to harm me,” Albanese said. “What can I do? I did everything I did in good faith, and knowing that, my commitment to justice is more important than personal interests.”
The sanctions have not dissuaded Albanese from her work — or her viewpoints — and in July, she published a new report, focused on what she defines as “Israel’s genocidal economy” in Palestinian territories.
“There’s an entire ecosystem that has allowed Israel’s occupation to thrive. And then it has also morphed into an economy of genocide,” she said.
In the conclusion of the report, Albanese calls for sanctions against Israel and prosecution of “architects, executors and profiteers of this genocide.”
Albanese noted a recent shift in perceptions in Europe and around the world following an outcry over images of emaciated children in Gaza and reports of dozens of hunger-related deaths after nearly 22 months of war.
“It’s shocking,” she said. “I don’t think that there are words left to describe what’s happening to the Palestinian people.”
The war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 people captive. Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed over 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between combatants and civilians but says more than half the dead are women and children.
Nearly 21 months into the conflict that displaced the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, the United Nations says hunger is rampant after a lengthy Israeli blockade on food entering the territory and medical care is extremely limited.