The skyline of Leskovac, a town in a basin between Suva Planina, Radan and Kukavica, often without even a breath of wind, is cut through by a column of black smoke created by the burning of cables. From somewhere else a similar formation billows forth, probably made up of specks of soot, toxic compounds of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur, and suspended (PM) particles, looming threateningly over the local National Stadium.
In the city centre, cranes rise out of a cap of smog, the only things visible, as everything else is submerged in thick fog that “sticks” these and similar toxic substances. By creating a collage from these three photographs, submitted to last year’s competition of the Leskovac association Team 42, a broader picture of the air in Leskovac emerges.
That picture often also has a sharp smell, caused by the burning of who knows what. Pollution received its most concrete confirmation in recent data from the xEco application, showing that in mid-December Leskovac was Serbia’s champion in the presence of PM2.5 particles, almost ten times above the permitted level. Paradoxically, the message from the local authorities was that the people of Leskovac were breathing first-category air. These claims were upheld by the Department for Environmental Protection at a recent session of the City Assembly, when the opposition demanded that an air quality plan be urgently drawn up, with everything such a document entails. After all, how can it be admitted that citizens are at risk from excessive carcinogenic and other toxic substances in the air, which cause the premature death of 13,000 people in Serbia every year?
Dejan Lekić from the National Environmental Association would describe this phenomenon of evading the truth as “denial of the problem”, which in our country comes after “neglect” and before “downplaying” the challenge. Leskovac has already passed through the first phase of inappropriate reactions due to the persistent refusal of the authorities to take over measuring instruments from the Environmental Protection Agency, provided by the EU. Because, under the 2009 Air Protection Act (which has since been amended and supplemented several times), in the event of poor readings they would have had to take action.
That “action” is precisely the adoption of an air quality plan, which, in addition to recording the state of pollution, identifies its sources and envisages measures to improve the situation. And this is something the Leskovac authorities clearly did not want to do.
Everyone does as they please
Taking over part of their duties and responsibilities, in line with its own capacities and, even more so, good will, Team 42 set about creating a map of polluters in the territory of Leskovac. In addition to the names of legal entities owning facilities that emit harmful gases and their locations, the map also records which of them do not comply with the regulations on six-monthly checks of pollutant emissions.
The activists did not stop there, but initiated court proceedings, succeeding in having a brickworks in the nearby village of Guberevac install a filter to purify harmful substances that the factory had been emitting above permitted limits. In the same way, the primary school Radoje Domanović in Manojlovac entered a procedure to change its heating system. The operation of the boiler house of the public utility company Toplana, one of the larger emitters of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur oxides, was also banned.
So-called private individuals could not be addressed in any way by this association, given the weaknesses of the legal framework, which is insufficiently precise when it comes to individuals who burn plastic, waste, used motor oil, railway sleepers, discarded (varnished) furniture and the like, because they belong to the poorest strata. Uneducated and unaware that in doing so they are signing their own death warrant, while also endangering the health of their neighbours.
“Improvised” stoves running on used motor oil
It is not for them to know, but for the authorities, which should, among other things, prevent the proliferation of the “grey” market on online trading sites, where “improvised” stoves are offered that can withstand much higher temperatures than ordinary ones. They burn everything listed above, with the described consequences.
“Ninety per cent of used motor oil disappears somewhere, either in the furnaces of such ‘stoves’ or through dumping, which is even riskier because it poisons the soil and toxic substances enter the food chain,” Lekić warns. And again, the (poor) people should not be blamed, but the fact that motor oil in Serbia is not recycled, nor is recycling encouraged in any way.
Nor do economic and other legal entities covered by the law, also emitters of carcinogens, suffer adequate sanctions that would bring owners or directors to their senses. Fines for the emission of less dangerous substances, such as carbon monoxide, are laughable, so the General Hospital in Leskovac was fined an amount of less than 100 dinars per day of exceedance, of which there were as many as 617 in the observed period.
On the other hand, in March the City of Leskovac adopted a Short-Term Action Plan for Air Protection, instead of the aforementioned more far-reaching one, so poorly drafted that it contributes in no way to improvement. The plan includes irrational solutions, such as “avoiding the lighting of flares at refineries”, even though there is no refinery here. And Leskovac is just one of a vast number of poisoned Serbian towns.
For some we have known for a long time – those that took advantage of the first wave of EU donations of monitoring stations and thus ended up on the “black” list: Novi Pazar, Valjevo, Šabac, Kosjerić, Užice, Kragujevac… The next wave, this year’s surge in the installation of measuring instruments, revealed pollution in Zaječar, Negotin, Prokuplje, Kruševac, Vranje, Loznica… and of course Leskovac. “In fact, only settlements in Vojvodina show satisfactory results, as they rely on gas heating and are also ‘privileged’ by their geographical position, without obstacles that would prevent pollution from being dispersed by the košava wind,” as Lekić observes.
Belgrade once again ranks among chronically polluted cities, where concentrations of suspended PM10 and PM2.5 particles reach alarming levels in winter. The sources of this type of pollution are the same as everywhere else – facilities in the industrial and thermal power sectors that burn fossil fuels. Medium-sized and small heating plants are also to blame, with lower individual capacity to produce these particles, which, like all others in the PM spectrum, cause cancers by entering the bloodstream of their “victims” through the lungs.
Motor vehicles are also responsible, although not to the extent often attributed to them, as such pollution is limited to traffic “rush hours”, the busiest streets, favourable geographical positions such as low-lying areas, and suitable meteorological conditions, calm air.
A law tailored to private interests
If we sum up all of the above, we arrive at the discouraging finding of the European Environment Agency that Serbia ranks third on the list of the most polluted countries in Europe, immediately after North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This fact is not the product of anyone’s hostility, as voices from the West are often interpreted, but of misguided domestic policy. Thus, this year the National Assembly adopted a new Air Protection Act “without adequate involvement of the professional public, and with the rejection of numerous comments and proposals from the civil sector”, as noted by Team 42.
Even the measures prescribed by the old 2009 law, and included in the Air Protection Programme for the period from 2022 to 2030, have largely not been implemented. Settlements are being concreted over instead of being greened, industrial plants introduce new technologies only if it suits them financially, while plans usually remain a dead letter.
“We simply do not have a habit of systemic resource management, and we have never analysed what has been achieved by the measures we may have taken,” says Lekić. That is why we do not know what to do next without jeopardising the personal interests of individuals and groups, the main stumbling block in regulating air quality. For these interests, the aforementioned 13,000 lives a year are sacrificed.
Here too, official data are merciless, showing that as many as nine out of ten people exposed to excessive air pollution develop a certain health problem. “The latest studies from this year show that 47 per cent of heart and cardiovascular diseases are linked to air pollution. Polluted air affects all organ systems, as well as reducing fertility in men and causing abnormal foetal development in pregnant women,” Team 42 warns.
Yet the authorities run tragicomic campaigns to boost the birth rate, instead of addressing improvements in the quality of life of citizens who have already been born. This kind of substitution of theses can be seen in every segment of “managing” air quality, from the adoption of regulations to their enforcement, and the absence of corrective and deterrent sanctions. Thus, Zijin in Bor was fined only one and a half million dinars for excessive emissions of harmful gases, PM particles and heavy metals such as arsenic, zinc, lead, cadmium and nickel.
Serbia is also periodically plagued by fires at landfills, which in most cases are nothing more than rubbish dumps. As waste decomposes in the depths, methane is created, smouldering until it ignites if there is no gas drainage or if it is blocked. When a fire breaks out, local authorities once again resort to denying the problem, issuing belated warnings for children and the elderly to stay off the streets and for windows to be closed.
At that point, the competent bodies supposedly measure the presence of PM particles, even though they have long since moved elsewhere, dispersed by wind or changes in air pressure. In this way, the authorities do not lie, but merely skirt the truth, which will cost them dearly as well, unless they are constantly equipped with full “war gear”, including gas masks.
However, caring about health becomes almost meaningless in the context of the “neglect, denial and minimisation” of the problem of polluted air. And yet, residents of smaller towns across Serbia, not covered by the national network of monitoring stations, which individually cost around 150,000 euros, resort to purchasing small measuring devices priced between 50 and 200 euros. It then turns out that the air in, for example, Arilje and Gornji Milanovac is even more polluted than in the cities listed above.
The West has solved the problem
And what are residents to do with such data if none of the authorities in charge take any action in response? “Plans should be the result of intersectoral cooperation, for which there is usually neither the will nor the money, nor often sufficient knowledge,” Lekić points out. This then leads to further failures in the subsequent phases of implementing regulations, which almost without exception conflict with personal and political interests.
But here is some seemingly good news: air pollution does not a priori affect climate change, which still fails to register with Serbia’s rulers. They persistently promote the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, which create the “greenhouse” effect, but do not affect the deterioration of air quality, even though this gas is a component of it. By copying solutions from the West, it is forgotten that European countries have largely eliminated the problem of pollution and are now focusing on climate change.
In our own thinking, everything is muddled, so we are content with administrative solutions with no grounding in practice, paying no heed to the 13,000 premature deaths each year.
(Radar, 30.12.2025)
https://radar.nova.rs/drustvo/kako-se-u-srbiji-resava-problem-zagadenja-vazduha/