• Energy Research

This paper examines the current challenges in urban waste managementsystems under EU regulations for a newcomer state. Piatra Neamț is amongthe first Romanian cities which made the transition from a traditional to amodern waste management infrastructure through ISPA funds. These changesare poorly reflected in the rate of recycling and treatment so faraccording to the analysis of waste streams. The paper performs a criticalreview of waste management services and also assesses the vulnerability toillegal dumping. Inappropriate sites of waste management facilitiescontribute to environmental pollution and urban landscape degradation.Comparative analysis between pre-accession period vs. current situationhighlights one the one hand the improvements in this sector and on theother hand the difficulties to comply EU targets.

The paper aims to mapping the potential vulnerable areas to illegal dumpingof household waste from rural areas in the extra- Carpathian region ofNeamț County. These areas are ordinary in the proximity of built-up areasand buffers areas of 1km were delimited for every locality. Based onvarious map layers in vector formats ( land use, rivers, buil-up areas,roads etc) an assessment method is performed to highlight the potentialareas vulnerable to illegal dumping inside these buffer areas at localscale. The results are corelated to field observations and currentsituation of waste management systems. The maps outline local disparitiesdue to various geographical conditions of county. This approach is anecesary tool in EIA studies particularly for rural waste managementsystems at local and regional scale which are less studied in currentliterature than urban areas.