Balkans

I had a strong sense of deja-vu today. On 31 March 2008, residents of the Zagreb suburb of Resnik held a protest against plans for a 385 000 tonnes per year waste incinerator which was to be built nearby. It was a sunny day and the majority of Resnik's residents came along to show their opposition to yet another industrial facility being built in their neighbourhood and to push for a waste management system built on waste prevention and recycling.

A new unit at the Kostolac coal-fired power plant in Serbia is the first coal project to be considered by the Espoo Convention Implementation Committee for transboundary impacts.

The news portal Deutsche Welle has visited the Kolubara lignite mine in Serbia and produced a short clip about the difficulties faced by the Serbian energy sector.

Our Serbian colleague Nikola Perusic speaks in the video about the terrible landslide that happened in May 2013.

People in the Submaidane-Turceni area in Romania live their lives in coal ash that still hasn’t been cleaned up after an accident that took place in December 2013 at an ash deposit belonging to the Oltenia Energy Complex in Turceni.

The renewables capacity installed in Romania has grown tenfold in the last five years and constitutes 23 percent of Romania's installed energy capacity. Still, the government is pushing for new lignite-fired power plants.

After several years of developments related to a seventh unit at the Tuzla power plant in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the public is now able to understand the plant's economics, thanks to a document published in the run-up to a debate in the Federation of BiH parliament this week. It might have been a better idea to have this debate earlier, considering that the news is not exactly good for the project developer, Elektroprivreda BiH (EPBiH).