German companies have dumped hazardous waste in the small Czech village of Jirikov, which has no facilities to recycle the crushed-up car batteries, shredded hard drives and wind turbine blades. So how did they get here?
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00:00Barbara Shishkova is not happy.
00:03The village in northwestern Czechia where she is mayor
00:06has had mountains of waste from a German company
00:09simply dumped on its doorstep.
00:11A closer inspection revealed that much of the trash
00:14is made up of fiberglass debris from shredded wind turbine blades.
00:19Hazardous material that's contaminated with a variety of harmful substances.
00:25The waste is piled on the site of a former sawmill
00:29and arrived by truck during the night while local residents were sleeping.
00:34The people responsible probably thought that nobody would care out here in the middle of nowhere.
00:42I guess they thought we were stupid and that nobody would notice.
00:49The contents of these sacks are particularly bad for the environment.
00:54They are marked in German as mixed plastic.
00:58But inside, the mayor found shredded hard drives and crushed up car batteries.
01:03They all contain toxic substances.
01:06Should they catch on fire, they'd poison the air.
01:09And lying here, they can seep into the ground water.
01:13Yerzykov is located in a nature reserve and has a population of just 350 people.
01:23Many of them depend on weekend tourists and winter vacationers for their living.
01:28All of them were duped by the company which had promised to set up a recycling facility here.
01:33We thought, great, that'll create new jobs locally.
01:37A lot of people here can't drive, including me.
01:40So it would have been good to be able to find work here.
01:42It's outrageous what happened.
01:46I reckon that with it raining and snowing, the pollutants are seeping into the ground water.
01:52It's the tons of shredded rotor blades that are the most shocking aspect for the mayor,
02:01brought here by a company with supposedly green credentials and a commitment to sustainability.
02:07Recycling the fiberglass reinforced polymers is extremely hard and above all expensive.
02:14Also among the waste dumped here are car components made of plastic and even aircraft parts.
02:22And it wasn't a one-time visit by the culprits, but the second time they were caught in the act.
02:27After the mayor alerted the police, five large trucks were seized and returned to Sender, back to Germany.
02:36When the mayor inspected the drivers' delivery orders, it became clear that they'd been falsified,
02:44in order to ensure the hazardous waste made it across the border.
02:48This R12 stands for recycling, but the material left here cannot be recycled.
02:57The order also referenced a German firm R from Bavaria and a Czech firm P as recipient, supposedly a plastic recycling company.
03:10We tried to track down that Czech company with the address leading us to the city of Ostrava.
03:16But there was no such street number.
03:19Local residents were able to point us to the firm's actual apparent location, across the road.
03:27But all we found there was one of several dozen letter boxes, but no premises.
03:33Company P is evidently a shell company, used to obscure the identity of the owner.
03:39By chance, a neighbor comes along.
03:42If you want to contact the company, you'll have to leave a message in the mailbox, which will be forwarded.
03:51All the property management has is an email address for the company, but no physical address.
03:57Over in Germany, the company R listed on the delivery order is based in this business park in Bavaria.
04:05In a phone call, the firm denied having anything to do with the waste dumping in neighboring Czechia.
04:19So, where do its rotor blades end up?
04:22Every year, Germany accumulates around 70,000 tons of debris from old wind farm turbines, replaced by larger and more modern versions.
04:32The manufacturers don't seem to have given much thought to where that material can be recycled.
04:40There aren't even any lists of the constituent substances involved, with the material often being simply shredded and incinerated.
04:50But there are solutions.
04:52The Fraunhofer Institute for Wood Research has set up a pilot facility, where the rotor blades are separated into their individual components.
05:01The end product of the process can be used as insulating material in the construction sector.
05:07The procedure should be ready for industrial use in the near future.
05:13And it's for packaging material too.
05:15This wood foam is manufactured without glue and has been patented by us.
05:20NovoTek, based in the eastern German town of Aschersleben, is already an established player on the market.
05:28Rotor blades are recycled here on an industrial scale, in a complex process devised entirely on site.
05:36Blades found to be containing too many toxic adhesives are not used.
05:41The ones that are, are ultimately turned into sturdy, weatherproof floorboards, ideal for outdoor terraces.
05:52Modern recycling methods offer hope for the waste dumped in the Czech village.
05:56For Mayor Barbara Shishkova, it was long unclear whether she'd have to deal with the waste on her own.
06:02But now there's news from Germany.
06:05Company R has gone bankrupt.
06:07And the Bavarian state government has agreed to take the hazardous waste back.
06:12We'll be back.
06:13We'll be back.
06:14The Bavarian state government has agreed to take the hazardous waste back.
06:15We'll be back.
06:16We'll be back.
06:17We'll be back.
06:18We'll be back.
06:19We'll be back.
06:20We'll be back.