‘People will burn anything’: energy poverty and pollution hit eastern Europe

Zoltán Berki, a stocky Hungarian man in his fifties, stuffs some twigs in his kitchen’s iron stove, throws on a log or two — and then an old football boot.

“It burns, and we need to stay warm,” he said. Across the northern city of Ózd as temperatures hit zero, other residents have also resorted to firing up their furnaces with polluting fuels such as lignite coal, wood or illegal items like rubbish to keep warm.

Getting through winter has become the priority for millions of people in eastern Europe who cannot afford the higher gas and electricity prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Across the region, the cost of firewood has doubled from last year as households stockpile reserves. Rates of energy poverty, defined as the inability to afford sufficient heating supplies, will rise significantly in countries such as Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria, say analysts.

“If the prices of basic goods, primarily energy and food, increase, that pushes many people into poverty, and those already under the poverty line into extreme poverty,” said David Nemeth, Hungary economist for Belgian bank KBC Group.

The increased use of toxic fuels also threatens to significantly raise emissions across the region.

“Years of development will go down the drain now. If their survival depends on it, people will burn anything,” said Zsuzsanna F Nagy, director of Hungarian environmental group Green Connection Association.

Unable to find a job in Ózd, whose Soviet-era heavy industry has largely been closed, Berki commutes 150km each way to work at a Budapest archaeological site. But his monthly salary of about €500 leaves little spare to buy firewood, which some shops now sell for more than €200 a cubic metre — roughly enough to heat a small house for a month.

Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán relaxed logging rules and ordered more mining of lignite, the sulphur-heavy brown coal regarded as one of the dirtiest fossil fuels. The measures show how climate change has fallen down the agenda of many governments.

Lignite and wood formed part of “the system that we use to protect families” from the energy crisis, Orbán said last month. Lignite is again fuelling the outdated Mátrai power plant 75km from Ózd, but it will also find a way into home furnaces. The area is a hive of activity as workers unearth muddy brown coal from nearby quarries several miles wide.

“Twice as many Hungarians die from air pollution as French or Dutch, relative to population size,” said Budapest-based Clean Air Action Group. “But deaths are just a tip of the iceberg as a hundred times as many people get sick.”

Poland removed quality standards for burning coal to reduce a supply shortfall after it fast-tracked an EU ban on Russian imports. Ruling party leader Jarosław Kaczyński last month told Poles to burn “everything except tyres” to keep warm.

“People should not be put in the position of having to choose between heating their homes or harming their health from pollution,” said Agnieszka Warso-Buchanan, a lawyer for the non-governmental organisation ClientEarth in Poland, who predicts air quality will plummet across the region.

Poland is subsidising the purchase of coal, which heats one-third of homes. Other governments in the region are introducing emergency support measures, though mostly not on the scale of their western counterparts.

“Support schemes are badly set up for the really poor,” said Dana Marekova, an environmentalist in Slovakia, where last year one-fifth of households were defined as being in energy poverty. The poorest Slovaks waste only small amounts of energy, she said, so they will not benefit from a new law subsidising households that reduce energy consumption by 15 per cent.

Slovaks have scavenged so much wood from the foothills of the Tatra mountains bordering Poland that Nová Lesná’s mayor Peter Hritz said his town was “going back 50 years” in heating methods and pollution. “Suddenly smoke and smog don’t bother anyone,” he told Slovak media recently.

The winter heating crisis will be particularly painful in countries such as Bulgaria, where two-thirds of rural homes burn wood. Even before the war 60 per cent of Bulgarians on low incomes could not adequately heat their homes, according to Eurostat.

In Kosovo, one of Europe’s poorest countries, wood is burnt in nearly every rural home and most urban households. A faltering electricity system including regular blackouts could contribute to a doubling of wood usage this year, according to Egzona Shala, executive director of Pristina-based environmental group EcoZ. Illegal logging will not cover the fuel shortfall, she added.

More expensive and lower-quality wood would drive a regional surge in illegal logging and use of more noxious alternatives, Nagy said.

For those who can afford more efficient heating units, supply is not keeping up with demand. Hungary’s furnace manufacturers’ association recently asked customers on Facebook to stop calling suppliers.

Back in Ózd, Berki burns toxic waste only at night so that the black smoke cannot be seen by the few police officers who patrol the area. Many other households burn waste under the cover of darkness, blanketing local churches and a smelter’s defunct cooling tower in foul-smelling smoke.

But in Hungary’s largest segregated slum close to Miskolc, another former hub of heavy industry and a short drive from Ózd, its 5,000 mostly Roma residents brace for harsher times.

“I have a cubic metre of wood, which will be enough for a month, maybe,” said Gáspár Sipeki, like Berki a Hungarian Roma. Sharing a shack with his son, Sipeki burns wood sparingly. When his stock runs out, he can buy more wood illegally through a clandestine deal deep in the Ózd valley.

“What else am I going to do?” asked Sipeki, who is employed in a public works programme. “I make €150 a month, I can’t buy wood for €100.”

Data and visual journalism by Federica Cocco