EU Funds Opened for Environmental Protection

The Federal Environmental Protection Fund has been actively working on nature and environmental protection projects for years. One of the Fund's most significant projects is waste management. An integral solid waste management system is comprehensive and includes waste prevention, recycling, utilization of waste's useful properties, and disposal. The Director of the FBiH Environmental Protection Fund, Safet Harbinja, speaks to the BH News Agency Patria about the Fund's initiated activities and planned projects.

NAP: What does the waste management, or solid waste management, project entail?

Harbinja: An effective integral system is based on fundamental postulates: how to prevent, recycle, and manage waste in a way that most effectively ensures the protection of human health and the environment. Local needs and conditions are evaluated, and then the most suitable waste management activities are selected under those conditions. This includes prevention at the point of waste generation, ensuring separation and separate collection, recycling, and ultimately reducing the quantities that must be disposed of in landfills. However, along with all of this, it is necessary to establish an effective system for monitoring the implementation of measures in the field and their evaluation. The Fund plans to invest in a primary waste separation system to reduce waste generation and utilize its valuable properties.

NAP: In European countries, waste has long been used as an energy source. What is the situation here?

Harbinja: Using waste as an energy source raises other important issues without which this possibility can only be discussed theoretically. The regulatory and legal framework, market conditions, and issues related to public opinion are important. The possibility of using European Union funds is opening up in this area. An example is Poland, which plans to build eleven "waste to energy" plants financed by EU funds.

NAP: What are the obstacles to the functioning of the waste collection and management system?

Harbinja: Waste management must be based on the effort to reduce waste quantities, increase waste sorting and recycling, utilize energy from waste, and preserve and improve landfills. The key issue here is the implementation of landfill adaptation plans, meeting sanitary disposal conditions, and removing illegal dumpsites.

NAP: The FBiH Environmental Protection Fund also has an established work program for this year. What are the projects?

Harbinja: At the very beginning of its work, the Fund identified the areas in which it would operate: protection, preservation, and improvement of air, soil, water, and sea quality, mitigation of climate change, and protection of the ozone layer. Implementation of energy programs, demining programs, construction of environmental protection infrastructure, etc. We have also completed the initial implementation of the Regulation on special environmental fees paid upon registration of motor vehicles and the Regulation introducing fees for air polluters (industry, combustion plants) in accordance with the Environmental Protection Strategy. The Fund has so far implemented five Public Calls for co-financing of environmental air protection projects, allocating 5 million KM for this purpose.

NAP: You have already mentioned the regulations related to the environment, but surely there is still a lot of work to be done in this area.

Harbinja: Environmental regulations have been intensively regulated and adapted since 2003, when the largest set of environmental regulations was adopted, including the one establishing the Fund. The fact is that this area is still not legislatively satisfactory. A lot of work is still needed to align regulations with EU directives on a realistic basis. Chapter 27, Environment, of the Stabilization and Association Agreement, which Bosnia and Herzegovina has signed, also speaks to this, and on the path to EU membership, its obligations will need to be fulfilled.