September the 10th, 2026 – Lika has been at the heart of a terrible hazardous waste scandal, and the findings are leading people to ask whether Lika will remain polluted forever.
The case of the illegal disposal of thousands of tonnes of waste in Lika has in recent weeks raised serious questions about possible environmental pollution, its scale and consequences for people, which is why a large protest was also held on Saturday in Zagreb. Vedran Salvia reports for Index that hazardous waste was being brought to Lika for years from neighbouring Italy and Slovenia under the guise of raw material for the alleged production of construction blocks.
It was then somewhat buried in an uncontrolled manner, and somewhat simply left out in the open. Croatian police, in an international operation with the support of Europol, have since arrested 13 people. Among them are entrepreneur Josip Šincek and his wife Monika, owners of the company Tipos Resur.
After the public was first confronted with findings about so-called “forever chemicals”, and then also microplastics in groundwater, the question opened of how much we actually know about the scale of the pollution and its possible consequences. Professor Branimir K. Hackenberger from the Department of Biology at Josip Juraj Strossmayer University in Osijek spoke out about the details of this awful case.
Hackenberger went through three publicly published expert reports from this specific case from Lika. These are the finding of the Faculty of Geotechnical Engineering from March 2026, its supplement from July, and the report of the Josip Juraj Strossmayer Water Institute on microplastics from August, which USKOK published yesterday. He emphasised that he is not a participant in the proceedings nor did he work on those expert reports, but comments on them as an ecotoxicologist.
what exactly are “forever chemicals”?
He explained that PFAS is a collective name for a family of over ten thousand synthetic compounds in which hydrogen on the carbon chain has been replaced by fluorine. This is important because the “hydrogen-fluorine bond is the strongest single bond in organic chemistry”. One of the consequences of this is persistence, says Hackenberger, “since in the environment there is neither a biological nor a chemical pathway that would break that bond under normal conditions”. Their characteristic is also that they are retained in the organism. For PFOS that time amounts to three to five years, our interlocutor explains.
The PFOS that Hackenberger mentions is one of the best-known and most long-lasting PFAS compounds, which due to its persistence and ability to be retained in the organism is considered particularly problematic. Another of the more problematic PFAS compounds is PFOA. For that “forever chemical” Hackenberger says that the International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2023 classified it among carcinogenic substances for humans, while PFOS was classified among possible carcinogens. As regards health effects, Hackenberger explained the following:
“The European Food Safety Authority has set a tolerable weekly intake of 4.4 ng per kilogram of body weight, and that for the sum of only four compounds: PFOA, PFNA, PFHxS and PFOS. The critical effect on which that value was derived is not cancer but a reduced antibody response to vaccination in children, thus an immune effect at very low doses. In addition, elevated cholesterol, changes in liver enzymes, thyroid disorders and lower birth weight have been documented,” he notes.
what was actually find in lika?
Hackenberger underlines that neither PFOA nor PFAS has been confirmed to have been discovered in Lika. According to the sampling by the Faculty of Geotechnical Engineering which was on 11 May 2026, and in which 20 compounds were analysed, other “forever chemicals” were found. “PFBS, PFBA, PFPeA and PFHxA are compounds with four to six carbon atoms and industry introduced them precisely as a replacement for PFOA and PFOS. Toxicologically they are milder per unit of mass and accumulate more weakly in the organism, but environmentally they are worse: they are more soluble, bind more weakly to soil, travel faster and, what is decisive for remediation, are significantly harder to remove from water,” he explained.
“Upstream there is nothing, and downstream it is 200.5 ng/L. The ratio is greater than 130 to 1 and cannot be explained by a natural background, because there is no natural background for PFAS; these compounds do not exist in nature,” he says. “To put 200.5 ng/L into perspective: that is twice above the parametric value for drinking water, but it is water from a borehole next to the landfill that no one drinks. No one has been exposed on the basis of that measurement and the expert expressly says so. The value of the finding is therefore not in the exposure but in that it is an early warning: it shows how the path from waste to groundwater is open,” are his words.
antimony was discovered in lika cabbages
He touched on antimony, a metal which in larger quantities can be very harmful to human health, and long-term exposure is associated with damage to the liver, heart and lungs. “The biggest chemical problem that was measured at that location is not PFAS but metals in the soil. Antimony reaches 317 mg/kg, while naturally it is below 1; copper reaches 9,946 with a maximum permitted concentration of 100; lead 1,051 with the same limit of 100. In the eluate of one sample ‘next to the silo wall’ antimony amounts to 499 mg/kg of dry matter with a limit of 0.7 for non-hazardous waste.
Antimony was also found in various plants, a piece of data that the media did not report: 0.28 to 0.34 mg/kg in woody species and around 0.3 mg/kg in cabbage at 20 to 30 metres from the pile. That means that the path from waste to edible tissue is closed, which for residents is a more direct message than any figure about PFAS,” he says.
there has been no pfas analysed carried out in the soil
He explained that by removing the waste the source is removed, but not what has already come out of it. “Exactly how much remains, honestly speaking, we do not know, and the measurement that would say that has not been done. PFAS was analysed in three water samples, while in the soil it was not analysed even once. The stock in the unsaturated zone cannot be estimated differently than by guessing without that, and I will not guess. What can be said as a framework is the following. Short chains, which predominate here, are washed out relatively quickly, realistically in a range from a few years to two decades. Longer chains and precursors, of which there are none in the water now, but which are probably in the waste, remain significantly longer. Remediation is therefore not planned in deadlines of a few years,” he also said.
teflon is also an issue
Hackenberger was then asked about a compound called PTFE, which is better known as Teflon. He says that Teflon, in the report of the Water Institute, appears only in one of six samples, and that in only two particles. They were found in a sample taken from a borehole that is located upstream of the landfill and serves as a reference point, while in the other five samples PTFE was not found. Because of that, he said, that finding is not proof that Teflon from the waste reached the groundwater.
“returning the underground area in the affected areas in lika isn’t realistic”
He warned that the location is not classic open karst, as one might conclude from some claims, but that according to geophysical measurements and drilling there is a poorly permeable base there. As the best solution he sees the removal of the source of pollution itself, that is complete remediation and disposal of the waste, whereby its further release would be stopped. As a temporary measure it is possible to cover the waste impermeably and prevent the penetration of precipitation. He concludes that returning the underground to a completely original state is not realistic, but it is possible to remove the source, prevent further pollution and monitor the state in the long term.
how dangerous are these microplastics?
He notes that nowhere in the world is there a health-based limit value for microplastics in drinking water.
“Back in 2019 and in later reviews, the World Health Organisation concluded that the evidence is not sufficient for deriving a guideline value, and Directive (EU) places microplastics on the watch list and prescribes the measurement methodology, but does not prescribe a limit,” he added. “The greatest value microplastics has here is as a marker, and not as a poison. Polystyrene in the groundwater downstream of the landfill and its complete absence upstream are a feature of a local anthropogenic source. That is how the report itself interprets it and that is logically correct,” he stated.
When it comes to public water supply, Hackenberger says that according to the data available so far there is no reason for the conclusion that it is endangered. “The Mrđenovac and Divoselo intakes are located upstream of the landfill and are hydrogeologically not connected with it, and public water supply is regularly controlled. When it comes to private wells downstream, no one has an answer to that question because no one has measured,” he says.
there can be plenty lying undetected
He was asked about what such analyses can still leave undetected, that is whether we can even ever truly know the full extent of the pollution if we analyse only the substances that we decided in advance to look for. “We cannot know it all, and that’s not a shortcoming of these specific expert reports but a limitation of the method itself. For example, the total PFAS parameter of 500 ng/L was not measured. It is measured as total organic fluorine, by AOF and EOF methods, and would be the only one to show how much fluorine there is in the water at all.
In studies where both are measured, the targeted twenty compounds usually explain between 1 and 30 % of the present organic fluorine. Translated to this case, the real load could be several times greater than the measured 200.5 ng/L, but that is an estimate from the literature, and not a measurement at this location, and that is precisely why it is worth doing that analysis. My own calculation, thus an estimate: on the basis of a base of 1,063 substances that appear in this kind of waste and the list of analyses that were actually carried out at this location, the expected number of substances that would pass unnoticed amounts to around 79%,” he noted. He warned of the fact that individual substances are assessed separately, while their mixture can have a different effect.
