Beside the airport on the outskirts of Cluj-Napoca, one of Romania’s fastest growing cities, lies an enormous landfill site. As you fly in, it’s easy to miss the multicolored roofs scattered between rolling green turf and mounds of waste. But at ground level, the area is teeming with life. Horse-drawn carts cross paths with empty garbage trucks returning to the city. Barefoot children run between makeshift wooden houses and crows circle overhead, says Deustche Welle.
This is Pata Rât, the country’s biggest landfill and long one of its most glaring environmental sins. For decades, pollution leached from untreated waste and garbage fires blazed, occasionally killing the occupants of those wooden shacks.
Under pressure from the EU, the city began work on closing the site in 2015. Some 2.5 million tons of waste, accumulated over 70 years and covering an area the size of 27 football pitches were turfed over, and at the end of 2019, the local authorities declared Pata Rât “history.”
Yet for the 1,500 Roma people still living here, Pata Rât is very much alive. And so is the environmental hazard on their doorstep. Two “temporary storage” landfills set up beside the old one in 2015 are still growing steadily, and experts say the old waste was never properly dealt with.
“This was not an ecological landfill, it was not built in line with European standards,” Nodis says. “All these toxic substances went into the soil, into the groundwater. Everything in the area is polluted.”
‘Temporary’ landfills next to the original Pata Rât dump have been steadily growing for the last five years and more
Driven from the city
The Roma residents of Pata Rât began to arrive in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some were driven by poverty to move to the landfill and work as waste pickers, but most have come in successive waves of evictions since Cluj-Napoca began to see a real estate boom in the 2000s. The last was in 2010, when local authorities evicted 350 inhabitants from Coastei Street near the city center.
Linda Greta Zsiga remembers the cold December morning when she and her family were woken by police, city officials and bulldozers at their door. Just two days before, they and 75 other Roma families living on the street had been given notice of their eviction. Their new home was to be a complex of small, modular units nestled between Pata Rât’s existing camps.
Linda Greta Zsiga says the Romanian authorities have treated her community like garbage
Zsiga says the Roma community on Coastei Street was well integrated. They had been there for generations, they paid rent and utilities on their publicly owned homes, and their children attended local schools and kindergartens. Yet suddenly they were being dumped on the city’s trash heap. “They considered us garbage, not humans,” Zsiga says, “and they thought we deserve to live there.”
Europe’s largest ethnic minority exposed to environmental hazards
Responding to a survey last year, seven out of 10 Romanians said they don’t trust the Roma. Between 20% and 30% said Roma people have too many rights, that the state should be allowed to use violence against Roma, or that discrimination and hate speech against the Roma should not be punished.
Such attitudes are not unique to Romania. Across Europe, racism against the continent’s largest ethnic minority results in denial of basic civil rights, exclusion from employment and public services, and — perhaps most strikingly — the marginalization of Roma communities to areas that lack adequate water, sanitation and waste management.
Often, these sites are also in hazardous locations. A study published last year by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) on “environmental racism against Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe,” found that the Roma were “disproportionately exposed to environmental degradation and pollution stemming from waste dumps and landfills, contaminated sites, or dirty industries.”
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