Talk to a Polish town mayor and, often, his proudest boast will not be his new clinic or school hall but his new drains. Across the country, the biggest item of public infrastructure investment is going underground - into EU-standard sewers and waste water plants.

It is a monumental job. The environment ministry estimates that about half the $30bn-$35bn Poland plans to spend to meet EU environmental standards will go on domestic waste water treatment. It is the item on the environmental agenda on which Warsaw is seeking the longest transition time before EU rules are enforced, following accession.

The current demand is for 12 years, although the European Commission has already said this is too long and Poland recently agreed to reconsider its request.

The lack of drains is a reflection of the general under-investment in environmental protection in communist times. Cities and towns were expanded with little spending on the treatment of wastes, which were poured into rivers.

In particular, the Vistula, the biggest river, served as the main drain for much of Poland, including parts of industrial Silesia and the cities of Krakow and Warsaw.

After the collapse of communism, air quality was rapidly improved by closing the worst-polluting industrial plants, by reducing output at other sites and by investing in filtering equipment, notably at power stations. Today, the biggest source of pollution is the same as western Europe's - vehicles.

As far as buildings are concerned, domestic fireplaces and boilers burning cheap low-quality coal - widespread in Silesia - are a worse source of air pollution than factories. But the government says this problem will only be solved with time, as people become richer and switch to more efficient and cleaner fuels.

With water pollution progress is slower because the costs of protection are much greater. Factories dumping poison into the rivers - such as cadmium - have been closed or cleaned up. But putting pressure on lower- level polluters, such as coal mines putting acidic water into rivers is more difficult, because of the scale of such sites and the numbers employed and the threat posed to their jobs by additional costs.

Dealing with the population at large is harder still, since restricting consumption is scarcely an option. The only answer is continuous heavy investment over many years.

Janusz Radziejewski, the undersecretary of state at the environment ministry, says Poland spends $2.1bn a year on environmental protection, or 1.7-1.8 per cent of GDP, one of the highest rates in Europe.

The investment is necessary both for the country's sake and to meet EU requirements, he says. About 95 per cent of the spending is domestically financed, with only 5 per cent coming from external aid.

Of the domestic total, about 30 per cent each comes from local authorities, from business and from environmental protection funds, which are financed by fines paid by polluting enterprises. The central government contributes only about 8 per cent.

Additional external funds arriving later this year as part of the EU's pre accession assistance, though valuable, will add only about 3 per cent to the total annual environmental budget, says Mr Radziejewski.

The European Commission has urged Poland to accelerate its investments, to reduce from 14 the areas in which it wants transition periods and to cut the length of these proposed transition periods.

argot Wallstrom, the environment commissioner, said on a recent visit to Warsaw: "We understand it will be difficult and it will cost a lot of money. But it's in our interest to cut transition periods as much as possible."

r Radziejewski says that the economy could finance a bigger burden of environmental spending, though the main burden would fall not on the government but on business and local councils and would be passed on to the general population through higher prices and bigger local taxes.

However, the limited supply of companies skilled in environmental construction projects is a serious obstacle, he says. The commission says the investment programme is not the only point of contention between Brussels and Warsaw.

It also criticises Poland for having failed so far to put in place the legal framework for bringing EU environmental rules into Poland. A senior commission official says: "Poland has made real efforts in cutting pollution but not in passing legislation."

r Radziejewski says that all the relevant legislation will be put before parliament by mid-2000 except for a draft law on genetically-modified crops which will be ready by the year-end.

However, European Commission officials are concerned that the progress of bills through parliament is too slow. Even though the ruling right-of-centre coalition of AWS, the Solidarity trade union's umbrella political grouping, and the Freedom Union, and the SLD, the main opposition group, agree on the overall policy of EU accession, the legislation is often delayed in arguments over the content.

r Radziejewski urges western Europeans to see the positive as well as the negative side of Poland's environment. As well as some heavily-polluted zones, Poland has some of the cleanest zones in Europe, notably in the east.

It has 22 national parks rated category two according to United Nations criteria. (Category one, the highest, is so rarely awarded that there is only one such park in Europe, in a small section of the Swiss Alps, where no human access is allowed).

By comparison, Germany has just three category two parks, France seven, and the UK none, says Mr Radziejewski.


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UNEP/GRID - Warsaw