Nestled in a quiet corner of the Transylvanian region of Romania, tucked between fertile valleys and forested hills, lies a village marred by the industrial wanderlust of Stalinist impositions in its satellite states. A ghost town lying upstream from the Tarnava Mare river, Copsa Mica was a sleepy hamlet of several thousand when the first industrial operations appeared in the area in 1935. As Romania came under Soviet persuasion and accelerated its industrial ardor, the village was earmarked for a production boom that would eventually tarnish and poison the place and people that would bear the costs without reaping any benefits. Two factories would play a central role in the introduction of industrialization to the valley and the environmental abuses of the next five decades.
Carbosin, founded in 1936, produced carbon black for the production of rubber. A main beneficiary of Romania's drive toward industrial nationalization following its designation as a Soviet satellite state in 1947, Carbosin was pressed into increasing levels of service with few modernizing efforts to lessen the strain - or its polluting potential. After Nicolae Ceausescu's conquest of autocratic control in 1965, the factory was a lynchpin in his pursuit for a greater international industrial presence for Romania. But, unwilling to spend money for even simple maintenance and upkeep, the factory fell further into disrepair. Filters went unchanged, machines lost crucial parts, and the short smokestacks poured increasingly high concentrations of escaped carbon soot on the village and the surrounding countryside. As quotas increased through the 1980s, the factory expelled seven tons of carbon each six-hour shift over a twenty-five mile radius. Finally recognized as the most-visible polluter in the area, Carbosin was closed in 1993 after fifty-seven years of ravaging the air and landscape of the village and surrounding environs. The closure put 1700 people out of work, still contaminated but with no way to even support themselves on the tainted soil.
SOMETRA, founded in 1939, is responsible for the greater brunt of the damage wrought on the small corner of Sibiu County. While the stains from Carbosin's black expulsions are still visible over ten miles from the smokestacks twelve years after they last spewed carbon into the Transylvanian air, the heavy-metal contamination from the non-ferrous metallurgical smelter has been the key culprit in the disastrous lead contamination of the area. As Ceausescu pressed for greater output from his factories, SOMETRA poured ever-increasing levels of lead, zinc, and cadmium into the topsoil and groundwater of Copsa Mica as the factories fell into greater disrepair. Ceausescu, unwilling to take on foreign debt to merely maintain his existing infrastructure, allowed SOMETRA and other factories to operate beyond capacity with ineffective and absent parts and filters. Hiding the true extent of the contamination from both the international community and its own affected citizens, Romania destroyed its environment with alarming efficiency and alacrity. The citizens of Copsa Mica, merely struggling to eke out a meager living from its soil and industry, puzzled as more of their numbers became ill.
As the topsoil radiated with contaminant levels hundreds of times above international safety limits, livestock began to fall infirm and expire. Population levels stagnated as both men and women became impotent. Rates of lung disease skyrocketed as the particulates in the air suffocated with each breath. The citizenry of Copsa Mica, because of this egregious breach of ethics by the totalitarian Ceausescu regime, now expect to live six to nine fewer years than their fellow Romanians.
Unfortunately, their plight is not expected to end anytime soon. Lacking the funding and government initiative to deal with the crisis, the citizens still live in an irradiated nightmare. Lead levels in the soil are still ninety-two times higher than the permitted level. The vegetation - the primary nourishment for most of the six-thousand residents of the village - contains contaminants at twenty-two times the permitted levels. Even with the closing of Carbosin and the purchase and subsequent renovation of SOMETRA by Greek multinational Mytilineos Holdings, inhabitants of Copsa Mica continued to be poisoned by that which is supposed to nourish.
The air remains polluted, clogging the airways and keeping Copsa Mica's collective lungs cancerous and underdeveloped. The food chain is polluted. Children continue to suffer lung diseases, lead contamination and arrested development. And, with the closure of one large employer and the scaling back of the workforce by the other regional dynamo, coupled with the general economic recession of Romania and other former Soviet bloc nations following the overthrow of Communism and largely-unassisted transition toward capitalist economies, few workers can afford to get away or even to purchase safe food. The environment is expected to remain polluted for decades to come.
Copsa Mica is beginning to will its way back to health following a half-century of industrial and governmental desecration. SOMETRA, through its Greek owners, is now in line with European Union emissions standards. Heavy-metal contaminant levels are slowly beginning to fade; each day the town becomes a little safer place to live. But the small Transylvanian village that became a toxic playground for a despot will remain a legacy of what humans can do to the environment if no consideration is given to anything other than output and profit. Copsa Mica has suffered from the whims of its overlords; now the world has left it to cut through the black clouds of its past and find the sunlight in its distant future.