Water pollution in Romania

There are 3 main causes for which water pollution in Romania still happens and is far from being stoped. 1. The first cause is indifference. The general public in the country does not care about the environment and environmental education in Romania is somewhat of a start-up. This leads to those small acts of pollution that multiplied in the thousands are a major source of concern. For instance a favourite past time of romanians is a barbecue out in the open, especially near a lake or a river. After each outing mountains of trash (plastics in particular) are left behind and find their way in the water. Solutions: I have identified to ways to deal with this issue. First we have CSR (Corporate Social Responsability). Big international companies and some romanian ones act in order to stop water pollution. For example one executive told in a conference how his employees cleaned a nearby lake of tons of plastic recipients. When asked "was the lake full of the same stuff next year" he said "Yes, but not as bad as the previous year. The people realise what we are doing and they tend to become environment aware so our task gets easier every year. We will do this activity untill the day that the lake will become plastic bottle free." Secondly we have growing NGO activity. A fine example is Let's Do It Romania, a record breaking national clean-up day. These solutions have great potential, but are - for the time being - local initiatives or few in numbers. Road not taken: environmental education is still not implemented or ineffective where used. This shoul be the starting point, the basis for all future actions. Unfortunatelly it is not. Yet. 2. The second cause is institutional weakness. This is a problem of Romanian government in general. Environmental agencies and authorities suffer from it as well. We do have European laws and rules but few specialists to enforce them, agencies with unclear objectives and corruption. The recent example of Romanian borders being locked down because the vast majority of frontier police was arrested says it all in this regard. Solution: institutional reform in this field. Clear procedures, rules and specialists to enforce them. Better salaries to ensure the diminuation of corruption. 3. The last cause is reactivity. Romanian authorities react to crisis, they do not proactively work on preventing crisis. This is a consequence of indifference (politicians are romanians after all) and of institutional weakness (the means of proactive action are virtually non-existent). For example the floods that occur annually are dealt with after they cause devastation instead of simply relocating population (where needed) and building/restoring dams. Solution: as strange as it seems - economic growth. This means a higher standard of life, higher expectations from citizens so they pressure the authorities and the government has the social peace and quiet to deal with water pollution issues.