Burning kilos of garbage and have only fresh air coming out the chimney might seem a fantasy at first. Westerners, however, take it very seriously. Especially when it comes to recycling waste by incineration. In Romania, it is cheaper to dump the garbage on a field somewhere.
Recycling waste is not a business in Romania yet. It is done by a hunch or not at all most of the time. However, Timisoara has the highest-performance incinerator operating in the country, in which Pro Air Clean has invested more than four million DM so far.
The incinerator in Timisoara opened last year. Located on the Calea aagului, the Pro Air Clean Company building may be mistaken for a modern laboratory at any time. After having won the battle with the red tape and having set up the company, the German partner has invested more than four million DM here. The equipment is state-of-the-art and has been brought in from Austria.
The company deals in waste recycling. Almost every kind of waste, as the only kinds of waste that cannot be incinerated here are radioactive substances, liquid acids or bases, metals and substances with more than 10% in chlorine content. The waste incinerated turns into a neutral non-polluting ash at temperatures ranging from 600 to 800 degrees Celsius.
Recycling does not end with garbage incineration, though, as the incineration-produced gases are filtered. This is the part of the business that can be carried out by the book only using Pro Air Clean technology. The gases pass through a special installation, where they are burnt at temperatures between 800 and 1500 degrees Celsius and produce pure air. Nothing, absolutely nothing comes out the chimney.
Although the company is the only one to posses such a technology in Romania, the 18 employees of Pro Air Clean do not have work to do all the time. Nicolae Ciclov, the company manager says there are two causes for this: the difficult situation of the Romanian economy and the lack of legislation to force those producing the waste to actually recycle it.