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Poisoned legacy of Albania's vast steel city
The Citizen
|March 27, 2025
Elbasan - Once the pride of Albania's communist regime, the giant Elbasan metals complex is now one of the most polluted sites in the Balkans, burdened with hundreds of thousands of tons of waste, much of it hazardous.
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Built in the 1970s with Chinese help, the vast "Steel of the Party" site once employed 10,000 workers in 500 factories during Enver Hoxha's dictatorship.
Now only a tenth of that number work in the privatised plants that have survived, with everything that could be sold stripped from the ruins of the rest.
Despite the risks and the stench, anyone can enter large swathes of the site and many earn a living scavenging the piles of hazardous waste in search of metals to resell.
"This is an area where 1.5 to two million tons of hazardous waste have been stored for over 35 years, polluting the water, air and soil," said Beqir Kila, a prominent Albanian environmental activist and engineer.
This story is from the March 27, 2025 edition of The Citizen.
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