PANČEVO - Air pollutants reached high levels of concentration yesterday. Chemical hazard sirens turned on at 20h.
Benzene levels reached more than 80mcg/m³ last night, a level 8 times higher than normal.
Dispatchers from the Petrohemija factory and the Pančevo oil refinery informed municipal bodies that they halted production. It is still not known which factory in southern Pančevo was the source of yesterday’s pollution.
The concentration of all air pollutants dropped during the night. The situa...
VIENNA - Danube NGOs are doing good projects that help protect and restore valuable wetlands in the Danube River Basin. But more wetland projects are needed to make better use of wetlands as pollution removers, says Peter Whalley of the UNDP/GEF Danube Regional Project (DRP).
‘Wetlands’ are places where water and land naturally cooperate to protect water, animals, plants and humans. Besides absorbing pollution, wetlands provide numerous other valuable services such as reducing the impacts from floods and providing ...
BELGRADE - Serbian Minister of Energy and Mining Radomir Naumov and Spanish Ambassador to Serbia Jose Riera Siquier signed today an agreement on donating €240,000 for the project “Strengthening the centre for renewable energy sources of the Serbian Energy Efficiency Agency”.
Naumov told a press conference that the funds will be used for improving the work of the Serbian Energy Efficiency Agency and the Agency’s centre for renewable energy sources, especially wind energy.
VIENNA - How to reduce security threats caused by environmental problems such as land degradation and soil erosion is the focus of an OSCE meeting that began today in Vienna.
The OSCE Economic and Environmental Forum brings together more than 250 policy makers, high-level experts and representatives of the OSCE's 56 participating States to discuss how to efficiently co-operate and co-ordinate efforts to reduce environmental harm.
"Global climate change, desertification, scarcity of resources, unsustainable us...
VIENNA - Romania will take over the Presidency of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR) for the year 2007, on Monday, 22 January. The handover will take place at an official ceremony hosted by the outgoing Presidency, Moldova, at the Palais Pallavicini in Vienna, Austria.
State Secretary of Environment and Water Management of Romania, Lucia Varga, will serve as President during 2007 and will guide the activities of ICPDR, which was set up to coordinate the protection and improve...
BELGRADE - Serbia’s first biodiesel plant will open this spring, its developer said this week.
The move will respond to growing environmental awareness in a country striving to bring pollution standards more in line with those of the European Union.
Financially supported by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Mladost refinery plans to start producing biodiesel from rapeseed, sunflower and soybean oils, its general manager Borivoj Jovičić said.
“If the weather is nice, the p...
SOFIA - Bulgaria will try to push the European Commission to let it reopen two nuclear reactors closed due to safety concerns.
In an interview with Reuters, energy minister Rumen Ovcharov was adamant that if not, the country will seek to raise the 570 million euros offered by Brussels to help pay for mothballing four of Kozloduy's six reactors to one billion euros as compensation.
Bulgaria agreed to shut down two 440 MW nuclear reactors at its Kozloduy plant at the end of 2006 ahead of its entry into the bloc...
BELGRADE - The Plant Protection Directorate of the Serbian Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management stated today that it has identified persons who falsified export certificates for exporting fruit to Slovenia.
Head of the Directorate Miroslav Vujovic said at a press conference at the Serbian government that the falsified certificates are used in international trade and they serve as state guarantees for good quality of products.
Vujovic said that in early November last year, a shipment of apple...
BELGRADE - Brzan Plast company from Batocina will invest EUR 2.6m over the next three years into setting up of a production plant that will be processing plastic waste and producing foil, where 112 workers will be employed.
Serbian Investment and Export Promotion Agency (SIEPA) awarded EUR 280,000 to Brzan Plast for the project, as part of the investment support projected by the National Investment Plan, the Agency informed. The project envisages starting collection of waste plastics at over a hundred collection cen...
ROME - Italian soldiers are still dying following exposure to depleted uranium in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, their relatives say.
Troops who served during the wars in the 1990s believe they have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from extended exposure to the munitions.
The US says it fired around 40,000 depleted uranium rounds during the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts.
A pressure group says 50 veterans have died and another 200 are seriously ill.
BELGRADE - What started on 14th November as pre-bombing scene for citizens of Pančevo, industrial town some 20 kilometers near Belgrade, when sirens warning of chemical danger because of extremely polluted air were turned on, ended two weeks later with a signal that they could breath again more easily after the representatives of the government, municipality and the industrial zone agreed to continue with activities aimed at reducing air pollution in the town.
There are two main sources of pollution in Pančevo, che...
RELJAN (Serbia) - In the past nine weeks, 161 depleted uranium missiles were recovered in Reljan, near Preševo, in southern Serbia, left after the NATO bombing in 1999. Serbian Directorate for the protection of the environment representatives say that the works in the area started on October 1. So far, 6.5 out of 12 hectares of contaminated grounds have been searched and cleared. A total of 2.4 cubic meters of contaminated soil has also been collected and removed. The government has funded the cleanup operation in the Rel...
MONTE PORZIO, Italy - Washington-based Uranium Medical Research Center claims that radioactive releases from uranium weapons used by NATO forces have amounted to 11 tons in the Balkans.
"Over the past sixty years, there has been more accumulation of deadly toxins than in the earth’s entire history," said professor Asaf Duraković, director of the Washington-based center at the IV International Media Forum on the protection of nature, held recently in Monte Porzio, close to Rome.
"If production of radioactive ...
BELGRADE - New modern electric filter at the thermoelectric power plant Kostolac A, near Belgrade, will help reduce the emission of harmful particles into the atmosphere and bring it to the level approved by the EU. The current emission rate of 800 milligrams per cubic meter will be reduced to 40 milligrams per cubic meter.
In the past two and a half years, three electric filters were installed at the power plant Nikola Tesla A in Obrenovac and as a result, the particle emission has been reduced sevenfold and is now...
BELGRADE - "A Short Handbook for Identifying Endangered Plant and Animal Species from the CITES List" has been presented today at the Environmental Protection Directorate, part of the Ministry of Science and Environmental Protection.
Serbia has been implementing the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) since 2002. 169 countries have joined CITES until now.
The handbook was translated from Russian and is intended to be used at the Customs Administration, Mini...
BELGRADE - The Head of the OSCE Mission to Serbia and Serbia's Minister of Science and Environmental Protection agreed that the OSCE Mission would extend expert assistance to develop and implement legislation on environmental protection.
OSCE Mission Head Ambassador Hans Ola Urstad (photo) and Minister Aleksandar Popovic specifically included in the agreement reached yesterday that the problem of waste management, saying that this issue is a priority.
"The 6th Pan-European Ministerial Conference on Environmen...
BELGRADE - The discontent of the people of Valjevo regarding the condition of the local dumpsite, which escalated to a crises after the locals blocked the garbage dump twice in mid-October, again raised the subject of one of the most pressing ecological problems in Serbia – waste disposal.
The Institute of Public Health announced that, due to prolonging delays in cleaning the town, there is a danger in Valjevo of the outbreak of an epidemic of digestive and other infectious diseases.
The population of several...
BELGRADE - The Energy Regulation Agency has the task of making tariff systems for counting electricity, to determine a methodology for setting tariff elements for electricity counting, and to determine criteria and methods for determining costs of connection to the transmission system, transport, and electricity distribution... This is its task. The question is, what has the Agency done so far, or not done? Its also very important to raise a question about the criteria for the selection of Agency Council members, to see ho...
BELGRADE - A Hungarian-US consortium will invest half a billion dollars in building a bio-ethanol plant in the town of Zrenjanin, along with a port and other infrastructure. The plant is expected to employ 1,500 workers. Scheduled for completion by the end of 2009, the project represents the largest-ever green field investment in Southeast Europe.
The state-of-the-art factory, to be the most technologically advanced of its kind in Europe, will process cereals into bio-ethanol, a clean fuel that can be utilised in combust...
BELGRADE - A contract was signed in Belgrade today on the construction of the first phase of the interceptor - a large waste water collection system, which will solve the problem of sewer drainage from the central city area for the next 50 years, enable the improvement of hygiene and communal standards and the following of the International Danube Convention.
The contract designates the construction of a tunnel to the waste water processing factory, which will be built in Veliko Selo, in the vicinity of Belgrade. Th...
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