The Debrecen municipality has rejected claims that it requested special emission limits to allow the discharge of industrial wastewater containing potentially harmful substances, including the solvent NMP, into the Tócó stream.
In a statement issued on 15 July 2026, the municipality said that a Facebook post by Enikő Tompa and a related article published by Debreciner contained “incorrect conclusions and false statements.”
According to the municipality, the claims suggested that Debrecen had requested the establishment of individual limit values in order to discharge treated industrial wastewater containing NMP and other substances from a planned industrial wastewater treatment facility into the Tócó.
The city leadership denied this, stating that neither the municipality nor its authorised representative had requested individual limit values for NMP or any other pollutant during the relevant procedure.
The municipality cited a statement from the environmental authority, which said that “the expert did not propose the establishment of individual threshold values.”
The city added that Tompa Enikő could not have received official information from the authority confirming that Debrecen had submitted such a request.
According to the municipality, the actual situation is that the Hajdú-Bihar County Government Office’s Department of Environmental Protection, Nature Conservation and Waste Management requested a statement from the city because no proposal for individual limit values had been submitted.
The municipality explained that individual limit values may be considered in environmental procedures because industrial wastewater treatment technologies can sometimes achieve better purification efficiency than the general legal limits require. In some cases, certain substances may also lack legally defined emission limits in Hungary.
The city emphasised that the purpose of setting such values is not to provide exemptions from existing regulations, and stated that Debrecen has not requested and will not request any exemption from applicable emission limits.
The municipality said it plans to consult the responsible ministry to ensure that emission limits are established for substances involved in the procedure where current legislation does not yet define such values.
Debrecen’s leadership added that the main goal of the planned industrial wastewater treatment investment is to prevent environmental pollution and ensure the lowest possible environmental impact.
