Not far from the centre of the Croatian town of Gospić, in the historic region of Lika, stands the grim industrial complex of the former company PPK Velebit. Here, at the foot of the mountains, in a region known for its national parks and clean rivers, the morning air no longer smells of freshness. It smells of chemicals.
For years, activists from the civic initiative “Gospić je naš dom” and the movement “Hodaj za Liku” filed complaints about trucks carrying unidentified cargo. The authorities assured them it was merely plastic recycling. In the end, the site — where a genuine ecological time bomb lies hidden beneath a thin layer of soil and gravel — became the epicentre of one of the largest environmental and socio-political scandals in Croatia’s history.
What happened in Gospić was not an accident and not simple negligence. It is a clear symptom of so-called “waste tourism” inside the European Union, where the corruption of local officials and the greed of international criminal networks have pushed an entire region to the brink of ecological disaster.
Warnings that unidentified loads were being delivered at night to the premises of Tipos Resurs in Gospić reached state inspectorates for years. The authorities’ response was systematically late. The turning point came only in February 2025.
In a large joint operation by Croatian police and Europol, 13 people were arrested in Zagreb, Varaždin and Gospić. The key figures in the investigation by the Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK) were the owners of Tipos Resurs — the couple Josip and Monika Šincek. Investigators established that between 2022 and 2024 their structures imported tens of thousands of tonnes of waste into Croatia from Italy, Slovenia and Germany, mixing it with Croatian medical and industrial waste. According to Europol, the organised crime group’s illicit profit from the scheme was at least $4.2 million.
The scheme was brutally simple. Instead of expensive, high-tech disposal at specialised plants in Western Europe, the most hazardous waste was taken to a Croatian province, dumped in the open or buried with excavators at depths of one to eight metres and mixed with soil.
The full scale of what lay underground in Gospić became clear in August 2026, when USKOK released the findings of a court-ordered expert assessment by the Faculty of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Zagreb.
According to the experts’ report, the total volume of contamination is about 37,000 tonnes of mixed industrial waste — residues from electronics processing, medical waste, plastics, construction and mineral materials. Of that, 32,000 to 33,000 tonnes have been buried. The mass of waste has been officially classified as HP14 (ecotoxic). Irreversible destruction of vegetation and environmental damage has been recorded over an area of about 17,800 m². Concentrations of heavy metals in the soil exceed permitted limits by tens and hundreds of times: copper up to 9,946 mg/kg — almost 100 times the limit for agricultural land; lead 1,051 mg/kg (ten times the limit); antimony 317 mg/kg (roughly 300 times the natural background). Heavy metals have already been found in crops grown on neighbouring plots.
The most alarming results came from groundwater analyses conducted by the Croatian Institute of Public Health (HZJZ). Samples taken downstream from the dump contained so-called “forever chemicals” (PFAS) and microplastics. The PFAS concentration reached 200.5 ng/l — twice the European and Croatian safety threshold for water intended for human consumption (100 ng/l). Experts stress that the contaminated aquifer is not yet connected to the drinking-water systems of Gospić and Otočac. Without urgent measures, however, the dump will remain a permanent source of toxins spreading through karst rock.
How was this possible in an EU member state? The answer lies in a chain of systemic failures and corruption.
Tipos Resurs obtained and renewed permits from the administration of Lika-Senj County even after inspectors from the State Inspectorate (DIRH) — whose chief inspector was later arrested as part of the investigation — recorded violations and issued orders. From February 2025 the Croatian Ombudswoman, Tena Šimonović Einwalter, launched her own inquiries and publicly demanded immediate action. Yet by September 2026 not a single kilogramme of hazardous waste had been removed from the main site. The reason is not only bureaucracy but Croatia’s lack of its own specialised landfills and treatment facilities for hazardous waste. The cost of fully remediating the Gospić site is now estimated at a minimum of €50 million.
The first state tenders to remove surface waste simply collapsed: specialised European companies refused en masse to accept the material because of its high toxicity and chlorine content. Only after the contract price was substantially increased did the first bids appear. Croatian authorities are now forced to search across Europe for capacity to bury or thermally treat the buried mass — from chemical plants to former salt mines. In the meantime they plan to erect a temporary impermeable cover on site to reduce, at least somewhat, the formation of toxic leachate during rain.
The scandal quickly outgrew a regional incident. Publication of material in EUobserver on 14 September 2026 gave the case an international dimension and called into question Croatia’s compliance with key EU rules on transboundary waste shipments (the Waste Shipment Regulation) and PFAS regulations.
On 5 September 2026 a large protest titled “Walk for Lika, Walk for Croatia,” organised by civic activists, brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets of Zagreb demanding the immediate clean-up of Gospić and the resignation of the officials responsible. The protests were openly supported by Croatian President Zoran Milanović, the opposition and leading environmental organisations.
Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and the Ministry of Environmental Protection came under a barrage of criticism. The head of government pledged to accelerate the work and hold those responsible to account, while acknowledging the enormous technical difficulty of the task. At the same time, a sense is growing in society that this was an organised scheme in which people profited by avoiding the costly proper disposal of waste, while the state apparatus looked the other way. Debate has also opened in society and in parliament about amending the Criminal Code and introducing liability for “ecocide.”
The events in Gospić are far from unique in Europe. For decades organised crime groups and unscrupulous operators have exploited weak points in the control of transboundary waste shipments. The classic example is Italy’s “Land of Fires” in Campania, where since the 1980s the Camorra and related structures illegally buried and burned industrial toxic waste. In 2025 the European Court of Human Rights stated directly that the Italian authorities had known about the problem for years but acted insufficiently, violating residents’ right to life; the region has recorded elevated cancer rates and groundwater contamination. Similar schemes periodically come to light elsewhere: Franco-Spanish networks illegally exported and buried construction and hazardous waste; large illegal dumps have been organised in the United Kingdom. Europol regularly runs operations in which tens and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste moved under the guise of “secondary raw materials” are seized. According to law-enforcement agencies, the illegal waste trade remains one of the fastest-growing areas of organised crime in the EU precisely because profits are high and, until recently, the risks and penalties were relatively low.
Conclusion: a lesson for all of Europe
Today Gospić has exposed how easily “waste tourism” from richer EU countries finds loopholes in regions with weakened oversight and corrupt institutions. It has become a test for the entire European system of hazardous-waste management. Meanwhile 37,000 tonnes of toxic mixture still lie in the soil of Lika. The risk of a large-scale environmental catastrophe remains concrete and measurable. There is still time to eliminate the dump — but it is running out fast.
