For more than four decades, poison has lain in the yard of the former OHIS chemical plant in Kisela Voda. Now, for the final phase of cleaning the small dump, an international tender has been issued - the deadline for bids was July 7, and the remediation itself is expected to start in September. The question isn't whether it will be cleaned, but why it took one of the most toxic sites in Skopje forty years to reach a „final phase."

The numbers are brutal. Since the project began in 2021, 1,969 tons of lindane and 586 tons of contaminated soil have been dug out and destroyed from the small dump. But full remediation still leaves roughly 916 tons of HCH waste, 2,191 tons of contaminated soil, 1,121 tons of contaminated concrete, and about 70 tons of soil polluted with mercury. The mercury was discovered only during the work - a surprise that only confirms how little we knew about what exactly is buried beneath our feet.

The tender was issued by the UN office, UNOPS, and last December the government promised 12 million euros spread over three years. The company that gets selected will also have to deal with what happens to the mercury, which is for now packed and temporarily stored in one of the already-cleaned basins. Temporarily - a word that in the Macedonian dictionary for ecology too often means permanently.

And the small dump is only the beginning. Right next to it sits the big one, presumed to contain around 50,000 tons of lindane. Near Dračevo, in a place called Pelenica, another 40,000 tons or so of pure and 6,500 tons of mixed HCH waste lie buried. When all the figures are added up, the small dump looks almost like a warm-up drill before the real problem.

Every step toward cleanup is good - no argument there. But the OHIS story is also the story of how a state lives above its own poison for decades, swapping out promises and deadlines while the surrounding neighborhoods breathe it in. The final phase of the small dump will be a victory only if it doesn't remain, as so many times before, one more excellent plan on paper while the big dump quietly waits its turn.