As a continuation of the June protests, a round table entitled "Economic development at the expense of the environment" was held in Perlez on July 18th. Perlez is one of the local communities in which the Belgrade Open School has installed a sensor for air quality monitoring, with an aim of providing access to information about what is the quality of air that citizens of Perlez breathe, since the official monitoring does not exist in this town.
Ognjan Pantić from the Belgrade Open School participated in this event - he emphasized the importance of including young people in environmental problems. He stated that the local public is insufficiently involved, because decisions on foreign direct investments are made at the national level, from the angle of macroeconomic stability. "This is achieved through employment subsidies, which reduces the level of priority of environmental protection," Pantic said, adding that the environment did not come to the fore by the will of decision makers, but due to pressure from the EU and citizens.
The moderator of this panel, Ilija Batas Bjelic, emphasized that the problems of the citizens of Perlez are compounds that arise from the thermal treatment of plastic waste and that official information about this type of a pollution do not exist. Forty days after the citizens of Perlez requested access to a Study on the Environmental Impact Assessment of this plant, they have not yet received an answer.
Prof. Ksenija Petovar, a retired professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Faculty of Geography at the University in Belgrade, explained that the concept of "economy first, then the environment" has been wrong and unsustainable since the first international conferences on the environment. She also underlined that pollution cannot be a necessary component of development, since development that negatively affects the environment and human rights cannot be labeled as development. She also referred to the environmental problems in Bor and Zrenjanin and asked when will we calculate the price of environmental and economic damage, as well as the damage to public health caused by production that allegedly contributes to the development of Serbia.
Siniša Mitrović, the head of the Center for Circular Economy of the Serbian Chamber of Commerce, spoke about the problems that are a consequence of growing consumerism and the impossibility of separating and treating waste in a technologically adequate way. He emphasized that technologies for the treatment of waste, including hazardous waste, which do not leave negative consequences on the environment, already exist, as well as that in Serbia there is a need to build the necessary infrastructure. He also stated that domestic factories are looking for significant quantities of recyclable raw materials, but that there is no one to provide them, because there is no primary selection of municipal waste.
The conclusion of this gathering is that the huge financial potential in waste recycling in Serbia is untapped and that it is necessary to involve institutions in solving environmental problems.
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