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Yugoslavia Pollution
After World War II, industrialization and urban development
progressed rapidly in Yugoslavia. As in other East European
countries, the environmental effects of such growth went
unrecognized for many years. In the 1980s, a constitutional
amendment and numerous environmental protection laws were passed,
but they had little initial effect on pollution of the air, soil,
and water. A small green movement struggled to bring the problem
onto the political agenda, but it had achieved little political
influence in 1990. Yugoslavia's air suffered from sulfur dioxide
pollution from vehicle emissions, trash fires, and the burning of
high-sulfur lignite (soft coal) in power plants and home heating
units. Oil spills frequently appeared on the Sava River;
dangerous levels of phenol in the Ibar River occasionally
required the town of Kraljevo to shut off its water supply; and
the artificial lake above the Djerdap Hydroelectric Station on
the Danube was referred to as the "dump of Europe." Nuclear waste
from Yugoslavia's only nuclear electric plant, at Krsko in
Slovenia (a main target of the Greens), had almost filled its
subterranean nuclear waste storage facilities in 1991.
Deforestation increased soil erosion problems, and mounds of
trash littered the roadsides in most eastern and southern rural
areas.
Data as of December 1990
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