Regional concept of environmental protection and waste management, with case studies of South Morava region

Regional concept of environmental protection and waste management represents a new methodology in spatial interventions which enable an integral view of all of the environmental parameters. In this way, contrary to the prevailing decentralized methodology of environmental protection and negation of the pollution aftereffects, it is recommended to form a unified database of main pollutants for the whole region. This database enables impact detection of specific factors (industrial facilities, waste dumps and other pollutants) on a scale which transcends to neighboring municipalities, regions, or the overall country. The state of the environment and waste management in the South Morava region is directly impacted by an array of environmentally degradable factors, with economics being the most prominent one (industrial facilities, which represented the main pollutants in the past, applied little, if any, regard to the environmental protection, dumping their waste on improvised, unprotected waste dumps). On the other hand, low level of employment, rudimentary industrial technology made positive environmental effect in the past 5 to 10 years, because of lack of direct pollution. The subject of this paper will be based on recommendations for better organization on regional level in the environmental and waste management field, and based on examples from Jablanica and Pčinja district, which are located in the South Morava region.