Monitoring of waste in Bulgaria for sustainable waste management

The problems of solid waste management in Bulgaria are many and varied. During the Socialist era little attention was paid to the issues and problems of environmental protection, and the roots of most if not all of the current environmental problems besetting the country can be traced back to that era. However, ever since Bulgaria's democratisation in 1989, increasingly more focused and determined efforts are being made to alleviate both environmental and health impacts of solid waste, aiming at achieving at least a modest degree of sustainability. But the problems are difficult, some intractable. A major difficulty in the policy-making area is posed by the scarcity (sometimes total lack) of historical and even current data on solid waste with regard to their sources, composition, complexity, etc. With a view to addressing this problem, an effective solid waste monitoring system has been set up at the Executive Environmental Agency of Bulgaria. In this paper a discussion of the salient features of that system is presented.