WARSAW (Reuters) – Warsaw is filing a complaint to the European Commission against Berlin for allegedly failing to remove waste illegally transported from Germany to Poland and stored there, Climate Minister Anna Moskwa said on Wednesday.
Some 35 tonnes of waste was illegally moved to Poland by German companies and stored at seven sites and has not been removed despite several formal requests, she said, without specifying the sites’ locations or when the waste was stored.Warsaw had appealed “numerous times” to German federal and regional authorities without getting a response, Moskwa told reporters, adding that if the complaint to Brussels did not bear fruit, Poland would take Germany to the EU Court of Justice.
Authorities in Berlin did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Poland’s governing Law and Justice Party this week clashed with opposition parties over responsibility for the country’s hazardous waste, after fire broke out on Saturday at a chemical waste storage site in the western city of Zielona Gora.
The site is not one of the seven referenced by Moskwa.
Poland toughened its laws against illegal waste imports and dumping in 2018, and last year began electronically tagging the transit and importation of waste. Authorities said they registered 42 illegal transports of waste last year.
(Reporting by Marek Strzelecki and Pawel Florkiewicz; editing by John Stonestreet)
