A rally was staged outside the Zagreb city administration offices on Thursday to warn about the harmfulness of projects by the Zagreb Waste Management Centre (ZGCO) which, the protesters said, would lead to building a landfill in the eastern neighbourhood of Resnik worse than the city's Jakusevec landfill.

A dozen protestors, who carried banners, said that Resnik “does not want a waste incinerator or other neighbourhoods’ waste” and that a project for a waste-to-energy plant in that neighbourhood was a trick.

“Mayor (Tomislav) Tomasevic is continuing all waste management projects launched by the former mayor, and those projects are harmful and disastrous,” said Branka Genzic-Horvat, head of the Resnik association, which staged the protest, noting that the ZCGO project was harmful for the environment and for the residents of Resnik and Zitnjak neighbourhoods.

Genzic-Horvat said that they had requested a meeting with the mayor and Zagreb City Assembly president Josko Klisovic, claiming the two refused to see them.

She said the ZCGO project, launched in 2005, would in the long run block the system of waste sorting and recycling in Zagreb and Zagreb County because waste incinerators use unsorted waste.

“Regional waste management centres have low waste sorting rates, they cause severe ecological and financial problems, as evidenced by the two centres of that type operating in Croatia. ZCGO and waste sorting do not go hand in hand,” she said.

She said that the decision to dispose of construction waste at Resnik and to install there crushers for bulk and construction waste as well as reloading stations for bio waste, along with the waste sorting facility at Zitnjak, was turning the two neighbourhoods into “a landfill worse than (the city’s main landfill) Jakusevec”, only six and a half kilometres from the city centre.