According to the draft of the new law on waste, municipalities could get more powers in the disposal of black landfills, he wants to impose more obligations on land owners. The Ministry of the Environment, which sent the law to the interdepartmental comment procedure, claims that the municipalities will finally be able to rely on the legislation and the owners will be obliged to cooperate. The real culprits of black dumps in the open countryside are hard to find. According to the interviewed experts, for example, the owners of land, such as forests and fields, will find it difficult to prove that they did not cause the black dump.
"Black dumps are a vicious problem of constitutional and property law. We dealt with all the constitutional principles in the new law in great detail and found a way that will help," said Jan Maršák from the Department of Waste at the Ministry of the Environment. According to him, it consists in the fact that the law will provide a procedure to find out the person who founded the black dump and ensure its removal.
If a black dump appears on the land and it is not known who caused it, according to the proposal, the municipality can order the owner or user (typically the tenant) of the land to remove such waste. The owner will then have to prove that he did not cause the black dump, for example that he did not create such waste in the past or did not build anything on the site.
"Although it is not your waste and someone dumps it on your property, you as the owner/user must prove that you did not cause it. We lawyers don't like proving a negative fact, because proving that I didn't do something is a significant problem, especially when you can't point to the person who did it and prove that he did it," said expert Lucie Matějíková.
Problems can therefore arise, for example, in private fields, forests or even on plots of cottages and other properties where their owner appears once in a while. According to Matějíková, he will not have a chance to find out who caused the black dump and to absolve himself of responsibility for the black dump.
Pavel Drahovzal, vice-chairman of the Union of Cities and Municipalities, pointed out that the draft law does not solve the problem of black dumps. Municipalities are already liquidating them and are constantly dealing with the costs. "What happens is that we are unable to prove in a misdemeanor tort that the black dump was caused by the owner," he said. He does not consider even the proposed subsidy from the State Environmental Fund to be a certainty. According to him, this would rather be part of the revenue from the landfill fee, which the ministry is planning to increase several times.
If we can't find the person, are we going to foreclose on the owner of the forest to remove it? This is a bit of nonsense," he pointed to the bill. According to the ministry, the enforcement would be for the owner to remove the waste at his own expense. In the past, for example, the Czech Environmental Inspectorate dealt with the most serious cases of tens of thousands of tons of illegally imported waste from Germany to Frýdlantsk, Liberec, Žatec and Tachovsk, for example, up to nine thousand tons of illegal waste was originally imported in the Arnoltice locality.
The bill also states that anyone who becomes aware of a so-called black dump is required to report it. According to Maršák, this can now happen thanks to the ZmapujTo application. An owner who does not report a black dump on his property and it significantly endangers the environment will face a fine of up to one hundred thousand crowns. "Nevertheless, it is necessary to realize that it is certainly in the interests of the owners to solve the issue right from the beginning, given that it is their property, and they are responsible for their property," added Maršák.
Source: ČTK, www.tyden.cz,
