Despite government incentives and regulations some people burn garbage in stows. It's a local cultural thing and the state seemingly is powerless to do anything about it despite being the 20th economy in the world.
Freezing to death is even more terrible for their health. It's also much more immediate. And so is being poor.
Breathing dust and smoke is a minor inconvenience in comparison. Any negative health effects will become noticeable in decades if at all. Doesn't help that most of the people responsible likely remember themselves or their parents breathing even worse stuff most their lives, with no ill effect being seen.
Hell, it's one reason I myself considered air quality issues to be overblown - I don't perceive smog. I couldn't tell you whether it's bad or good air day in Kraków - I could only tell you when the air is too clean because I get sore throat then. I no longer consider air quality to be an overblown fad, but that's because I have small children and they start coughing non-stop when the air gets bad.
I understand keeping warm, but the idea of burning garbage seems like there could have been many steps to avoid that. Raiding nearby forests. Finding scrap wood. Informal charcoal industry. I guess the trash is "free" and "effortless" but I don't understand how the smell alone doesn't put people off. I guess it has been going on so long to be normalized.
It's not just poverty, but education about pollution and a common view in the post-communist countries that the common good (clean air in this case) isn't so important. It's the same with things like noise or graffitis for instance.
In Latvia you commonly see rich people with BMW SUVs behaving like this. My friends see no problem with having coal barbecue or very heavy music in the center of Riga. We often have to remind new tenants in our building the benefits of sorting waste - and they are not poor.
I wonder why post communist countries lagged behind so much in this regard? Seems like this awareness only really hit the US in the late 90s and early to mid 2000s, well after the iron curtain came down. I guess mass media must have been still siloed by language and there might not have been much english language media presence by that point sharing these ideas.
You are right in the language silo, many of those countries have also small populations, which means fewer content to consume, and a certain intellectual insularity.
Out of curiosity, why would you burn your trash, and especially plastics? It smells and is clearly unhealthy and the caloric content is worthless compared to wood.
Several garages near my house have people living in them, and they burn anything that burns -- plastic bottles, pieces of used tires, rags soaked in used motor oil. I'm pissed as hell at them, but the country is already poor, and they have even less.
Old/low quality stoves leak a lot of emissions in the house, but people don't realize it. Also, smoke finds its way back in the house quite easily. Sad that such extreme tragedy of the commons still happens.