Bosnian Biodiesel Factory – You’ve Come A Long Way Baby!
A biodiesel factory in Bosnia? It seems like just yesterday, but it was in 1995. That was the year I crossed the Sava River from Croatia, into Bosnia, and entered a country that would change my life forever.
Three different armies had killed hundreds of thousands of people, (including an ethnic cleansing campaign waged by Slobadan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic) casting the country into the dark after the power went out. This was a world where people had to run down “Sniper Alley” to get fresh drinking water in Sarajevo, and rural farmers resorted to eating the bark off trees.
A Nuclear reactor, near where I patrolled in my Hummer, sat silent and cold as enterprising people cut down dead power-lines to sell the copper in them. Families held off the cold winter by huddling around burning furniture and tires.
It’s now 13 years later and Bosnia is rebounding, and one of the signs of its new prosperity its new biodiesel factory, about to open near Banja Luka.
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The company responsible for this new factory is System Ecologica (LLC), founded by Nenad Kokanovic and Borivoje Vukadinovic. This plant will serve as a model for additional plants in neighboring Eastern European countries as well as in China.
System Ecologica will manufacture biodiesel utilizing a variety of feedstock such as rape seed oil, cotton seed oil, used cooking oil and animal fat (chicken fat ). The Company intends to be profitable from the first month with an initial production of 30 tonnes a day of biodiesel to be sold locally. System Ecologica plans to purchase its feedstock through arrangements with existing feedstock suppliers locally and from other regions of Eastern Europe such as Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Georgia.
Now that the landmines have been cleared from the fields, the lights have been turned back on and the threat of violence is over, rural farmers can return to doing what they do best, growing crops. This time for fuel for tractors instead of feed for the horses that they have been using to pull their plows.
Source: System Ecologica
Photo courtesy of PNP, via Creative Commons License
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October 4th, 2008 at 1:38 am
Finally some good news from a part of the world that has seen its share of hatred, cruelty and death. It makes me feel good that somewhere someone has changed this place for the better.
Bravo. All I can say is keep it up.
October 4th, 2008 at 2:09 am
Subrot0,
Thanks for you’re comment. Yes, it’s great to see them succeeding. A lot of what went on in Bosnia didn’t get reported by the media, and there are still a lot of people who don’t realize how bad it was. That’s why I was excited about this article. It’s great to see the people getting back on their feet.
October 4th, 2008 at 6:15 am
I crossed the Sava in Jan of 96 as a platoon leader of a US combat engineer unit and saw the level of devastation. I am heartened by the progress that such a venture represents. The article made my day!
October 4th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Marcus, you must have come across right after the Sava flooded, on the pontoon bridge, yeah? I bet you were either at Tuzla or Tent City.
Thanks for you’re comment, and I too was excited when I put this article together.
Thanks for serving.
Adam
October 8th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Adam, what do you mean by nuclear reactor in Bosnia? Are you sure?
The only nuclear reactor (power plant) in former Yugoslavia was (and still is) in Slovenia, near Croatian border. As far as I know there is one more reactor in Belgrade, but used only for scientific and research purposes.
Greetings from Zagreb, Croatia!
A.
October 8th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Adam,
>Three different armies had killed hundreds of thousands
>of people, (including an ethnic cleansing campaign
>waged by Slobadan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic)
You are full of it.
Even Serb haters agree that at most 100,000 were killed, while there is no evidence that more than 20,000 have been killed.
No conflict has had as much propaganda flung about it as the Yugo secession and succession wars.
Took me a couple thousand hours of research to wade through this sh1t put out by ignoramuses (or liers) such as yourself.
October 9th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Chris,
It’s interesting to me that someone from an anti-war site (which I’m all for)would deny what happened in the Baltic’s.
I’d like to ask you, the 100,000 you speak of, is that number attributed to military personnel only? Or does that number include the women and children I pulled out of mass graves and wells? Does that number take into account the graves in school yards and backyards because many of the cemetery’s ran out of space?
As far as the 20,000 number you mention, I’m sure that you are aware that 8,000 men and boys were killed by the Army of Republika Srpska in Srebrenica alone.
I don’t follow propaganda much, I just go with my own experiences and conclusions based on actually being there.
Thanks for the comment.