Central Europe Turns to West to Clean up

Western firms are speculating that they can improve earnings by investing in Central Europe's pollution cleanup.

A case in point is Herbert Case, an American. He bought a soil-decontamination plant and shipped it from the U.S. to clean a seven-hectare site contaminated with fuel oil. The plant had been used to clean up a railway siding in Las Vegas, NV.

The plant, operating as CEVA Hungary Ltd., a Hungarian-American joint venture, now is removing oil-contaminated soil at a rate of 40 tons per hour by tumbling it in a heated rotating drum. Much of the oil is being reclaimed and sold for fuel. The site contains some 93,000 cubic meters of contaminated soil and a million cubic meters of contaminated ground water.

CEVA's contract with the district of Budapest where the contaminated site is located is worth some U.S.$2.8 million. The work is expected to end in December 1999, Case said.

Case, who was in the environmental services business in the U.S. for more than 30 years, confessed he had gambled in bringing the plant to Hungary, at a cost of some $2.5 million.

However, he said it was the only way to convince executives of the Hungarian oil company MOL Rt and the state railway company MAV, whose companies are potential users, that the technology was appropriate.

Central Europe has become a magnet for U.S. and Western Europe firms as the result of the determination by Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland to join the European Union.

A senior adviser to the Hungarian government on environmental issues said that his country's cleanup needs amount to about a third of one year's gross domestic product.

Vera Horvath, general counsel to the Environment Ministry, said that there are as many as 1000 "illegally dumped hazardous waste spots'" around Hungary. Many are only now receiving serious attention.

The Environment Ministry says 174 sites are registered for its Environmental Remediation Programme, but this number could jump to 5000 to 10,000 as more are identified.

One of the most notorious is in Gare, southern Hungary. There, some 16,000 tons of chlorinated distillates from a chemical works, plus tanning wastes, have been stored for 17 years in steel drums, some of which are leaking.

The previous case study was adapted from a report prepared for Reuters Wire Services.