Thousands protest in Croatia to demand government clean up toxic waste

What the report says

Tens of thousands of people marched in Zagreb on Saturday to press Croatia’s government to deal with an illegal hazardous-waste dump near the town of Gospic in the country’s mountainous Lika region, according to Al Jazeera. The protest reflected growing anger over what residents and opposition figures describe as months of delay in removing more than 30,000 tonnes of buried medical and industrial waste.

The article says the scandal has become a broader political problem for Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic’s conservative government, which critics accuse of corruption and of downplaying the scale of the pollution. Croatian police and Europol arrested 13 people in February in connection with the alleged illegal import and dumping of waste that investigators say was brought from elsewhere in the European Union since 2023. Officials have said a contractor has now been chosen to begin the cleanup.

The government maintains that soil and water tests have not shown contamination, but that position is challenged by a recent assessment from Croatia’s anticorruption agency, which found elevated metals in soil and PFAS chemicals in groundwater near the site. Protest organizers demanded a detailed cleanup plan with deadlines, while environmental experts warn that any contamination could spread through local rivers and porous ground, potentially affecting the Adriatic coast and the tourism economy.