Ministry of the Environment, summoned by 52 NGOs to implement a program for water sanitation

Water pollution has direct effects on human and animal health. The situation is very serious and the measures taken so far have not achieved their goal.

The MaiMultVerde association, with the support of 51 non-governmental organizations, requests the Ministry of the Environment, Water and Forests, through an open letter, to create a national program for the management of riverbanks in order to sanitize watercourses, but also for the creation of an infrastructure for the collection of natural waste. The implementation of the program would be supervised by the National Agency for Environmental Protection and carried out with the support of local public authorities, financed from the Environmental Fund. According to the open letter: "Through the projects implemented over time, the MaiMultVerde Association has documented dozens of illegal deposits of waste, especially on the Danube and its tributaries, and found that the local public authority, legally responsible for sanitation, does not have the capacity to do it. The Danube runs through 12 counties in Romania and 143 territorial administrative units. Most of these are in the countryside, and the river banks are not close to residential areas. Considering the geography of the southern Danube basin and its flood zones, the banks are not considered the responsibility of UATs and no funds are allocated for their monitoring and sanitation.

At the same time, Romanian Waters, the main authority for water administration at the national level, does not have water sanitation in its attributions, and gross pollution is not included in the list of main pollutants, - Annex 6 to the Water Law. The waste remains "hidden" under the water or abandoned on the banks and does not influence the score given to the state of the water, they are practically ignored at the moment by those responsible for picking them up". Loredana Pană, MaiMultVerde advocacy expert, said: "Local town halls, especially those in rural areas, do not have the physical and economic capacity to carry out riverside monitoring and sanitation projects. At the moment, the phenomenon is completely ignored and in recent years has gained a large scale. The lack of waste collection infrastructure, as well as the poor information of the population regarding waste management lead to the storage of waste on the unsupervised banks of the Danube. They must be used sustainably, for ecotourism, to bring benefits to both local communities and biodiversity, deeply affected by uncontrolled waste pollution".

The recommendations contained in the open letter submitted to the Ministry were carried out in the framework of a working group initiated in 2023 within the project "For a Danube with clean banks", through which the first nature and leisure ecotourism route in Giurgiu County was set up, between the localities of Slobozia, Oinacu, Giurgiu, Gostinu and Prundu called the Danube Ecoroute, over a distance of 44 km. Even though 80% of the route of the Danube Ecoroute is in a protected area, real waste deposits have formed on the banks, mainly domestic, but also from construction, industrial, etc. With the help of volunteers, more than 10 tons of waste were removed from the route, but the situation is far from being resolved.