Serbia – A Mining Eldorado or a Country Where Laws Are Ignored
AMO
/ Ed. 29. 1. 2025
When someone mentions a park, the associations are typically grass, benches, swings, children, adults, walking paths, birds, trees, and cleaner air. However, the city park in Bor, a town in eastern Serbia, is unique in that instead of cleaner air, heavy metals like cadmium and arsenic are regularly inhaled.
According to publicly available data, this is the daily reality for the residents of Bor. The levels of heavy metals in the air are excessive and hazardous to health, with concentrations ranging from several times to dozens of times higher than the permitted limits.
As a result, Bor residents face a significantly higher risk of developing all types of cancer, except skin cancer, compared to the rest of Serbia, according to a study by the “Institute of Public Health Dr. Milan Jovanović Batut.” Additionally, they are at higher risk of dying from respiratory, cardiovascular, and digestive diseases.
The local population believes the pollution levels are even higher, suspecting that official measurements at some monitoring stations underreport the true extent of the contamination.
The article by Predrag Popović was originaly published with the support of the project Enhancing the Capacities of Serbian Investigative Journalists in Mapping Foreign Influence in Serbia by N1. You can read the original version in Serbian here.
