Prague – Many households in Czech rural areas use hazardous waste for heating thus creating poisonous gases that threaten their neighbours but the Environmental Inspection (CIZP) is helpless to stop it, the daily Pravo writes today.
Thousands of Czechs burn PET bottles, old shoes and other waste in their stoves to heat their houses. They poison the air, especially in rural areas, but they face practically no punishment, the paper says.
The CIZP has no legal means to punish people for burning hazardous waste in their household heating appliances.
On the contrary, the inspection faces no difficulties in carrying out controls of small industrial boilers, Pravo writes.
“Every year we receive requests from many citizens to fine their neighbours for burning hazardous waste in their stoves and thus polluting the environment with burnt gases and smell,” Oldrich Janeba, from the CIZP, told the paper.
“The complainers point out that their neighbours put their health and property in danger. However, the Inspection has no legal tools to control whether people who have solid-fuel boilers installed in their houses burn hazardous waste in them,” Janeba says.
Under the law on atmosphere protection, each operator of a stove, a fireplace or a coal-fuelled boiler is obliged to ensure CIZP inspectors access to the heating appliances.
However, this does not apply to the operators of heating appliances in private houses and private summer cottages.
The Inspection can only urge them to observe the set limits for the thickness of burnt gases and smell, but it has no tools to force them into changing their behaviour, Pravo writes.
Citizens who suffer from such ruthless behaviour of their neighbours have no other choice but to file a complaint with the local authorities. However, even the authorities have no right to violate the principle of the untouchability of private property, the paper says.
An amendment to the law on atmosphere protection that has been drafted by the Environment Ministry and was approved by the government last November, would, if passed by the Chamber of Deputies, allow regular controls of domestic boilers, Janeba said.
If the boiler owner denied a CIZEP inspector entry to his house he would have to produce a document on the state of the boiler.
If he failed to do so he would be fined on the spot a sum equal to the fine imposed for the operation of the appliance that does not meet the set criteria, Janeba said.
