Residents of Ravna Tresnja village, situated near the northern Bosnian city of Tuzla, are coping with illegal dumping issue which threatens not only their environment but also their health.

The local residents say all kinds of waste is illegally disposed in a forest near their homes.

“Literally everything. They bring carcasses.(…) Instead of breathing in this beautiful nature, all we have is the waste they send us,” said a Ravna Tresnja resident Zoran Golubovic.

According to the locals, those involved in the illegal dumping near their homes are mostly business entities, secondary waste collectors and citizens who avoid paying public utility services.

General Manager of Tuzla-based public utility company ‘Komunalac’ Admir Becirovic said the unscrupulous citizens were a problem.

“I must say that the whole region is included in the waste pickup, they have the dumpsters. We regularly provide service. However, there is a number of unscrupulous citizens,” added Becirovic.

Ecologists believe that the solution lies in continuous clean-up and illegal landfill management, introducing the primary selection of waste in households and the waste composting, as well as the obligatory waste pickup and obligatory payment of the service.

“If we made an analysis of one existing illegal landfill and saw who disposed their waste illegally, if we punished them all and exposed them in media, nobody would ever think of disposing the waste again,” said Dzemila Agic of the Tuzla Centre for Ecology and Energy.

Inhabited houses are only a hundred metres away from the illegal landfill, which has been the site of illegal dumping for decades.