Opening of a tire factory in Serbia that is already working, pollution reports unavailable

The Chinese tire factory Linglong, which was built in Zrenjanin, a city in the north of Serbia, officially opens on Friday, September 13, although at least one of its three plants has been operating for more than a year - producing and exporting tires.

The five-year-long construction of this factory was followed by accusations related to the poor working conditions of the employees on the construction of the factory, suspicions of forced labor, objections to violations of laws in the field of construction and environmental protection.
The company's official reactions to those accusations were rare, and the security of the Chinese investor repeatedly prevented journalists and non-governmental organizations from communicating with employees and accessing the factory complex.
Not much is known about what is happening in the factory, which is surrounded by three-meter-high walls and built on donated state land of almost one hundred hectares, with 76 million euros of approved state subsidies, not even immediately before the grand opening ceremony.
Among other things, it is not known what the announced start of production entails, bearing in mind that according to research by RSE journalists, of the three planned production plants of the factory in Zrenjanin, one plant has not been built, the second does not have a use permit, and in the third, tire production started a year and a half ago. .

The truck tire production facility is in full swing
During 2023, almost silently, without ceremonies and official visits, the Chinese factory Linglong started the production of tires for trucks and buses.
As stated in the company's financial report, Linglong produced and sold tires worth 3.3 billion dinars (about 29 million euros) last year.
According to the data of the international trade database Sinoimex, analyzed by RSE journalists, Linglong exported its products to Turkey last year, while since March of this year, tires produced in the Zrenjanin factory have been exported further to Turkey, as well as to the USA and Kazakhstan.

The factory will produce 13 million tires per year
The truck and bus tire production facility that was put into operation is one of a total of three facilities where Linglong should also produce tires for passenger cars, trucks, buses, industrial and agricultural vehicles.
Satellite images show that the plant for the production of tires for industrial vehicles and agricultural machinery has not yet been built.
According to data from the Environmental Impact Assessment Study, the total planned production of the Zrenjanin tire factory Linglong is 13.62 million tires per year, or about 40 thousand tires per day.

The production of tires in Linglong began before the facility for the production of tires for trucks and buses was issued a use permit, according to the documents from the construction permit database of the Agency for Business Registers (APR).
"The production facility in question was put into trial operation before the issuance of the usage permit," according to the response of the City Administration of Zrenjanin dated July 23, 2024.

Trial work and elimination of defects
Trial operation during which Linglong produced and exported tires was approved for the Zrenjanin tire factory on May 19, 2023.
According to the Law on Planning and Construction, during the trial period, the technical capacities and compliance of production with laws and regulations are checked. The test work is approved by the independent committee in charge of the technical inspection of the facility, which is hired by the investor.
As can be seen in the documentation that RSE received from the City Administration of Zrenjanin pursuant to the law on the availability of information of public importance, the technical review was carried out by the engineering company Servo Mihalj from Zrenjanin.
In the report of the technical inspection commission, which approved the trial operation of the Linglong facility, it is stated, among other things, that "there are defects in the facility and internal installations, but that they do not affect the functionality and operation of this phase of production."
The trial operation lasted one year, after which in May 2024, on the basis of a new report of the same commission, the Linglong facility was approved for issuance of a use permit with the assessment that all deficiencies in the installations and in the documentation have been removed in the meantime.

Unknown impact of production on the environment
During the trial run, Linglong was obliged to submit to the Environmental Protection Agency reports on measuring the emission of polluting substances into the air from the plant where production was started. Until the conclusion of this text, the Agency has not responded to the request of RSE journalists to provide us with those reports under the law on free access to information of public importance.
We did not receive information from the city of Zrenjanin as to whether the start of tire production in Linglong affected the air quality in Zrenjanin.
In the reports of the independent commission, on the basis of which Linglong was approved for trial operation, it is stated that before and during the trial operation of the facility, measurements of pollutant emissions into the air were made and that the results of all measurements showed that there were no limits exceeded.
For the treatment of pollutant emissions and unpleasant odors in the air, six waste air purification filters were installed, which brings the emission of polluting substances below the permitted emission limit values, according to the report of the technical commission from May this year.
However, the report does not state how many emission values were measured and how many measurements were taken in operating conditions at the highest load.
In the vicinity of Linglong, there is no measuring station for regular monitoring of air pollution, according to data from the Zrenjanin Public Health Institute.

'Non-existent' waste storage
Until the publication of this text, the City Administration of Zrenjanin did not provide RSE journalists with information on whether the city controlled the correctness of the water that the tire factory discharges into the public sewer after purification, as well as Linglong's reports on waste management.
From the two reports of the technical inspection commission, which RSE had access to, it is not possible to conclude how and where the waste from the Linglong factory where production was started was stored.
Linglong was issued a permit for trial operation and a use permit based on the commission's conclusion that non-hazardous waste from the production plant is disposed of in an open waste storage facility organized inside the factory.
However, Linglong, which began trial operations in May last year, received a building permit for the construction of a non-hazardous waste storage facility only a year later, in June 2024.

"An inspection of the satellite images revealed that the warehouse was built well before the application for the building permit was submitted," claims the non-governmental organization Regulatory Institute for Renewable Energy and the Environment (RERI).
Due to suspicion of illegal construction, RERI filed a criminal complaint against Linglong, and they also filed an appeal against the decision that an environmental impact assessment is not required for a non-hazardous waste storage facility with a capacity of 700 kg per day.
"The problem is that all these procedures are pointless because while you are deciding on the appeal and the criminal report for a year or two, during that time the building has already been built without any conditions that would include consent to the environmental impact assessment and the measures contained in the construction permits Ljubica Vukčević, a lawyer at the Regulatory Institute for Renewable Energy and the Environment (RERI), told RFE/RL.
Claims that the waste storage facility was built without a permit, Linglong denied, stating that the aerial photographs do not show a storage facility but, as they pointed out, a temporary facility "for assembly and production of formwork".
If the company's claims are correct and if the warehouse was not built before the June 2024 construction permit, it remains unclear where the plant has been dumping waste during the more than a year of operation of the facility, which was launched in May last year.
Linglong did not answer that question of the RSE journalist.
The factory was built without a single environmental impact assessment study
From the beginning, the construction of the Chinese tire factory Linglong was accompanied by public concern about potential environmental pollution.
The Chinese factory will produce millions of tires in a city where the ban on the use of drinking water has been in force for 20 years due to the excessive presence of arsenic and heavy metals, and the air quality, even before the start of the tire plant's operation, was classified in the third, worst category - excessively polluted.
The organization RERI for RSE assesses that citizens' concerns are justified.
"Linglong starts working without an act on nature protection conditions. It is an initial act that they had to submit in addition to submitting a request for the issuance of location conditions," says RERI's lawyer Ljubica Vukčević.
She points out that the Linglonga factory is located only two kilometers from the special nature reserve Carska bara, and that the act on the conditions of nature protection is necessary for all investors who carry out activities that may have an impact on nature, especially protected areas.
Vukčević assesses that from the point of view of environmental protection, it is unacceptable and that the tire factory does not have a unique assessment of the impact on the environment.

"They cut the project into several phases, into several smaller projects, in order to make the situation easier for themselves and artificially show that some ancillary facilities within the complex do not require an environmental impact assessment. This is inadmissible from the point of view of law and logic, because all those objects are part of a whole," claims Vukčević.
The Renewable Energy and Environment Regulatory Institute (RERI) currently has 18 cases against Linglong before the Administrative Court.
The prosecution rejected the criminal charges they filed earlier for building eight buildings without a building permit and environmental impact assessment consent, with, as they state, the explanation that Linglong showed its intention to submit the necessary requests.

Uninvestigated allegations of forced labor
The Linglong factory in Zrenjanin is also followed by a series of cases related to abuse of workers and violation of workers' rights.
Earlier this year, the non-governmental organization Astra filed a criminal complaint on behalf of 11 workers from India on suspicion of human trafficking and labor exploitation.
A few years earlier, the exploitation of hundreds of workers from Vietnam, who at that time were engaged in the construction of a factory in Zrenjanin, was also suspected.
The European Parliament, in a resolution from 2021, asked Serbia to investigate this case of "modern slavery", however, it ended without initiating proceedings, with the return of the workers to Vietnam.
Linglong denied responsibility, claiming that the workers were hired by one of their subcontractors.
"The Government of the Republic of Serbia has not fully investigated credible allegations of forced labor, including confiscation of passports, inhumane working and living conditions, and has continued to claim that Vietnamese and Indian workers are not victims of human trafficking," according to the US State Department's latest report on human trafficking.
The tire factory of the Chinese company "Shandong Linglong Tire" in Zrenjanin is part of the "Belt and Road" initiative - through which China seeks to increase investment and influence through infrastructure projects in countries around the world.
The construction of the factory was contracted back in 2018 with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of the Republic of Serbia and the Chinese company Linglong. With the conclusion of February 2019, the Government of the Republic of Serbia declared this project a project of national importance. The state gave the Chinese investor 96 hectares of land as well as EUR 75.8 million in non-refundable financial aid.
The total investment of the Linglong company in Serbia should amount to at least 800 million euros, with the obligation to employ a total of 1,200 workers.

CONCLUSION

The opening of the tire factory in Zrenjanin in Serbia caused a lot of controversy both in Serbia and in the region. Starting from the fact that a factory is being opened whose facilities have been operating for more than a year, the very non-transparent operation of the factory when it comes to compliance with the laws in Serbia, which regulate the field of environmental protection, to numerous never-investigated reports against the factory for abuse of workers and violation of workers' rights. This is another Chinese investment, which is followed by non-transparent, but also illegal work, while the official authorities of Serbia do not provide the public with details about numerous issues that are bothering, first of all, the citizens of Zrenjanin, but also the whole of Serbia. Non-transparency is especially present in the part related to the protection of the human environment, and the citizens of Zrenjanin have problems with poor quality of air, water, and soil.

All this speaks in support of the claims of civil society and the media that Chinese investments and loans in Serbia, but also in other countries of the Western Balkans, are mostly shrouded in secrecy, while the public can only speculate about the consequences that the state and citizens will feel in the future because of such a way functioning of Chinese investments and loans. Apart from civil society and the media, government institutions generally do not deal with the problems that arise due to the non-transparency of Chinese investors' operations. This is why there is a need for more significant involvement of government institutions in the supervision and monitoring of the legal work of Chinese companies in the countries of the Western Balkans, and additional caution when it comes to concluding new contracts with Chinese investors and creditors.