A contractor today completed the removal of waste from an illegal landfill in Brno’s Horni Herspice back to Germany, as the 282 tonnes of plastics and laminates from airplanes and wind turbines were driven away as planned, Czech Environment Ministry spokeswoman Veronika Krejci has told CTK.
However, tens of tonnes of waste remains at the site and the Czech side will continue to negotiate with Germany on this.
Originally, there were about 317 tonnes of waste at the site, brought there by the German company Roth International in 2024 and 2025. The first 35 tonnes of waste were taken away by the commissioned company last December. There were initially doubts on the German side about the origin of the remaining 282 tonnes, but the company started removing this part at the beginning of last week.
However, there is more waste in the landfill than expected. Dozens of tonnes of waste remain there even after the planned removal was completed today.
According to the spokeswoman, the exact quantity cannot yet be clearly determined because the documentation provided during the transport does not seem to fully correspond to the actual amount of the material loaded. Therefore, she said, negotiations are continuing to finalise the disposal of this part of the waste.
She also said the findings so far suggested that the remaining waste was also related to Roth’s activities. “We will continue intensive communication with the German side to reach an agreement on the disposal of this part of the waste in Horni Herspice,” said Jaromir Wasserbauer, chief director of the Environment Ministry’s technical environmental protection section. “Our goal is, in cooperation with the Czech Police and on the basis of additional evidence, to ensure a complete clean-up of the site and to confirm responsibility for all the waste that was illegally brought to Horni Herspice.”
Roth International was also responsible for the illegal impact dump in Jirikov in the Bruntal area of north Moravia. German authorities arrested the firm’s managing director in connection with that last August, accusing him of exporting both regular and hazardous waste abroad without a permit on 21 occasions since 2022. The man has been in custody since then.
Meanwhile, the government of the Upper Palatinate, one of Bavaria’s administrative regions, has taken over responsibility for removing the waste from illegal dumps in the country. The German authorities are paying for all the work. A company commissioned by the German authorities transported around 300 tonnes of waste from Jirikov last autumn.
