Over the past several years, air quality in Romania has become a serious concern, and it seems that somehow things are getting worse each year.
As I am writing this, winter hasn’t even started in Drobeta Turnu Severin (the city I’m currently living in), but the air is already worse than ever. And with the cold weather, it will become thick, smoggy, and at times, downright unbreathable.
Even without a fancy gadget, you can feel the air quality plummeting. Walking outside can feel like standing behind an old exhaust pipe. After a quick hour-long walk one evening, my clothes stunk of smoke, something I never thought possible in Romania.
Smog is now a reality here in Romania. Whenever it’s foggy in my city (and most likely in most places in the country), the air becomes hard to breathe, especially during the winter when you have all that extra smoke – especially the one coming from wood-burning heaters.
Poor air quality is the new normal
It’s not just my small city where you can see these problems. I believe that smaller towns have it just as bad as the larger ones because many houses still are heated with wood. These produce plenty of smoke which makes the air unbreathable, especially if there’s a thick layer of clouds covering the sky (which is usually the case during the winter in Romania).
Bucharest, the country’s capital, has been in the spotlight too, with pollution levels occasionally matching (or even being worse than) those of global cities hit by environmental disasters or heavily industrialized, huge megalopolises.
Another problem, in my opinion, is the way many of the country’s official air quality monitoring systems are placed. Many are in relatively green areas like parks or near forests (or close to the Danube, in my city’s case), giving a skewed picture of air pollution.
Even more so, they focus primarily on monitoring PM10 particles and often ignore PM2.5, which are smaller and are apparently more harmful to our health.
Because of these gimmicks, the authorities have official data that says that the air quality in Romania is acceptable or good. Which is definitely not the case.
Of course, some cities are better than others in terms of air quality (but also based on various other values). You can check out my previous article about the best cities in Romania to see the rankings.
Why is the air quality in Romania so bad?
There are a few reasons why the quality of the air that we breathe here in Romania has been going down over the past several years.
As I said, it’s worse during the winter because of the extra vehicles people take out, but also the cloudy skies that trap in all the other exhaust, especially from the heating sources.
During winter, I can’t open the windows early in the morning or after 5 PM, because that horrible smell gets into my room! This is unacceptable and scary at the same time.
As I said, not all cities are that bad. When we lived in Constanta, for example, things were much better overall.
The number of cars has grown like crazy. And since Romania is not one of the wealthiest countries around, we’re usually talking about old, second hand cars brought from Western Europe. And these are worse to the environment than new ones are.
In my city alone, in the area that I moved into when I bought the apartment in 2014, you can easily see the growing number of vehicles. Now it’s almost impossible to find parking spots at specific times (before, there were plenty of options).
Also, they’re currently expanding the parking lot in front of the building and they built a new one in the back, a few years ago.
Plus, everybody I know is complaining about the increasing number of cars: the people here no longer seem to consider it enough having a car for the family, but a car for each member of the family. And this doesn’t help with the air quality problem!
And there are other factors that contribute as well: illegal burning of waste and garbage, intensive construction work in most cities and various factories that are close to the living areas… all these make the air that we breathe dangerous.
And it seems that it all gets worse during the winter when nature can’t clean it as fast as it would if the skies were clear.
How Bad Is It, Really?
Even though there has been a change in stance recently, most of the official data says that the air quality in the country is relatively ok.
However, since gadgets for measuring the air quality are easier to obtain, and there are also NGOs who like to take matters into their own hands, we don’t have to rely on the official data alone – which might not be complete (not counting all the important air pollutants).
Platforms like AerLive.ro, set up by NGOs and volunteers, provide a much clearer picture of the situation, although just in Bucharest and Cluj Napoca at the moment. Still, you can check the website and see that the PM2.5 and PM10 levels often exceed safe limits by a large margin, making the air unsafe to breathe during these times.
I now have an air purifier running 24/7 in my room because I suffer from all sorts of allergies and the air purifier helps keep the air clean (or at least it’s supposed to). It usually shows me an AQ of 30 (which is not great, but OK), going down to 2 (which is great) after running for a few hours.
During the winter, though, as soon as I open my windows to let some “fresh” air in, the air quality drops instantly to 50 – sometimes, even worse.
The worst it got was to 120 – when you entered the room it felt like there had been a car running there for a while.
What can you do about the low air quality in Romania?
Right now, there is not much you can do about this. The government will probably start rolling out some measures that will improve things a bit – but it will be slow and difficult.
However, it’s good to know that the worst air is measured during the winter – and during this time, we don’t have a ton of people visiting the country. So as long as you’re not here in the winter, things will look much better.
In the past, the environment minister also recommended people in Bucharest wear face masks to protect themselves against pollution.
Finally, try to stay inside during the peak air pollution times: strange or not, these are usually during the evening and over the night. When you go out during these times, don’t run in order to reduce the amount of air you take in. This sounds like advice from sci-fi movies. So sad it’s becoming reality!
If you want to actively do your part in keeping the country (and the world) clean, reduce the amount of time you spend in a car, reduce waste as much as possible (as most of it is burned in Romania, causing massive pollution) and support the NGOs and organizations that are trying to save the planet.
But we’ve definitely got a tough fight ahead of us and until then, we don’t really have much of a choice than to know that the air quality in all cities around the country is really low – especially during the winter.
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I remember the immovable blue haze in winter over my small town near Sighisoara. I like the smell of wood fires but this was really oppressive. Besides burning wood to heat their homes, the farmers also burned their leftover dried cornstalks. I thought that was a waste of good organic matter but the farmers didn’t have access to farm machinery which could have turned the stalks into feed for livestock. Americans are often smug about the improving air quality in many of our cities. This is more due to polluting industries moving to China and Mexico. Talk about bad air quality! I don’t know about Mexico but I have seen nightmarish pictures of Beijing pollution. The Japanese use kerosene stoves to heat their homes here in Hokkaido. I believe that is a big improvement over coal or wood. I thought Romania was a big natural gas producer? That burns pretty cleanly. I’m sure Russia would love to sell it if you don’t have enough. It might come with “a few strings attached,” though!
Fortunately, many of the apartment buildings are heated with gas – otherwise it would be crazy. The problem is in the smaller cities where there’s no gas yet and even apartments have wood stoves for heating – that’s really difficult in my opinion since storage space for the wood itself is limited when living in an apartment… I am sure that Russia would love to help the air pollution problem, too, haha.
Air quality is bad in a lot of places isn’t it? I’m afraid it’s going to be an ongoing problem for the world, even in so called developed countries. I remember the pollution in Thailand, and at home with the diesel fumes and the fact that burning rubbish and rubber is the way to go :-). That last image is really depressing, but kerosene, wood stoves etc… are not going away anytime soon unfortunately. It all seems so pointless but we definitely gotta keep doing our little bits to help the environment.
Yes, with the growing population, things will definitely get dirty sooner rather than later. People here use to burn rubber and basically dump everything into the fire. When I took that long walk around the city with my wife, we were talking, based on the smell of the smoke coming from the houses: “these guys burned their Christmas tree…” “these burned some rubber” “these are burning regular wood” and so on.
It’s good at least that more and more people are starting to see that they have to do something and even small steps will matter in the long run…
I wish I lived where you do, rather than the centre of Bucharest. Funnily enough, even though we haven’t met, our blogs seem to cover very similar topics. I compiled a post in this exact subject just a week or so before you (www.whitemountain.ro/blog) but this is such a serious topic, the more coverage it gets, the better. Tonight, on a quiet bank holiday Saturday night, the air in the centre of Bucharest is 17x the max healthy limit (pm2.5 levels)
But there are some things you can do. Not a cheap solution at 500e a pop, unless you get a second hand one on say, ebay, but the Philips air purifiers remove a lot of the harmful stuff & adding plants can help also. i will expand my article to include some of these measures & add a link to this article as it contains details I haven’t covered.
Yes, with all the recent media coverage, air quality in the country is definitely one top priority. Regarding the air purifiers to use at home, I actually use a cheap version – the Xiaomi Mi Air Purifier – and I am extremely satisfied with how it performs. When I changed the filter, for example, it was absolutely crazy – it looked so bad that I immediately ordered another one for the living room as well.
Hopefully now, with more and more coverage and more people drawing alarm signals, the authorities will start implementing measures. 17x the max healthy limit is insane!
Here in Ploiesti, (been here since 2022) because of the oil refineries, the air quality is unsurprisingly very poor..in fact workers here are allowed to retire two years earlier than the rest of Romania because of it..
I can imagine that in these heavily industrialized areas, things are even worse. Hopefully our leaders will be able to find a solution sooner rather than later…