Albania has begun a nationwide operation to clear long-abandoned “car graveyards” in an effort to reclaim polluted public spaces for community use, Prime Minister Edi Rama said on September 21.

The clean-up drive follows a recent meeting on integrated waste management where the prime minister criticised the long-neglected car dumps as “completely primitive”. 

In a video posted on social media, Rama showed images of rows of rusting vehicles in the southern coastal city of Vlora, describing them as decades-old “evidence graveyards” that had been left to decay in municipal lots.

“Thanks to the Seized Assets Agency, an end has come to these graveyards that have blackened our lives for 30 years,” Rama said. He called the sites “huge sources of pollution” and said the cleared land would be converted into green areas or other projects benefiting the public.

Rama added that any vehicles still in working order would be reassigned to state institutions.

Earlier this week, the government began clearing a similar site in the northern city of Shkodra, which Rama previously labelled a “large pollution parking lot”.

Albania has one of Europe's oldest car fleets, with the majority of its cars imported second-hand from Germany, Italy and other West European countries. 

Rama has launched a broader drive to improve waste management in Albania. The country lagged behind both EU members and most of its neighbours in the Western Balkans in waste handling, only getting its first landfill designed to EU standards in 2005, with most of the country’s rubbish dumped in informal landfills. 

However, efforts to overhaul the sector have been marred by a major scandal concerning funds siphoned off during the construction of three waste-to-energy incinerators. 

Speaking at the end of August, Rama said the entire waste management process will be centralised under a new national waste treatment operator, rather than being handled by individual municipalities. 

Rama commented that Albania has made “significant progress” in keeping the country and beaches clean, especially during the summer tourist season, as well as in waste treatment. 

However, he added, “we are in a completely primitive situation in relation to the separation of waste at source, in relation to the extended responsibility of producers, which includes plastic packaging, which includes paper, glass, electrical and electronic equipment, batteries, vehicles at the end of their life, we are, I believe, the only country in Europe that has car cemeteries legalised without a law.”