Question

top 10 slogans on waste management

Answer 1

To convert waste as wealth
Don't convert wealth as waste

Answer 2

Citizens’ massive protests against introduction of big waste incineration plants mount in Russia. Russians want to collect waste separately and effectively recycle, whereas large state corporations lobby combustion of solid domestic waste as the solution of the landfills problem. Over a 100 thousand signatures have been gathered by the local residents of Moscow region and the city of Kazan’, the capital of Tatarstan republic, and meetings and protest actions take place, but they are ignored by the Federal television.

More than 60 to 70 tons of solid domestic waste accumulates annually in Russia, and, according to the official statistics, only 4 to 5% of that volume are recycled, while more than 90% are buried in landfills. There are more than 15 thousand official and more than 17 thousand unofficial landfills, the waste covers more than 4 million hectares of the country’s territory, which approximates the territory of the Netherlands or Switzerland, or is twice as big as Slovenia and four times as big as Cyprus.

From 1st January 2015 on certain amendments to the Federal law#89, ‘On domestic and industrial waste’ were accepted, which structurized the hierarchy of state attitudes and approaches towards waste management, one reechoing strongly the current European one. Waste prevention, maximizing effective use of raw materials, separate waste collection and recycling have priority. Waste combustion takes up the last place on the list. It is now that Russia has the opportunity to switch to cyclic economics based on principles of sustainable development.

Waste recycling sector business community and ecologically concerned general public held hopes that certain actions would be taken in order to develop and implement nation-scale programs for separate collection of domestic waste and for recycling plants development, which was and is seen as a tool for gradual re-channeling of waste streams from landfills into recycling.

However, these hopes proved unjustified. A year ago state corporation “Rostech” pushed the plans for launching 5 waste incineration plant through the Russian Government. Of these 5 plants 4 are in vicinities of Moscow and 1 in the city of Kazan’. Furthermore, “Rostech” has put before an offer to put 7 more such plants into operation, of which 4 are planned to be in vicinities of Moscow and 3 in the Black Sea region. Some companies, which specialize in waste incineration equipment, such as Hitachi Zosen INOVA, are making their way to the Russian market. While in Europe the said company invests into gas production from organic waste, in Russia they wish to pull through a domestic waste incineration technology as their focus area, perfectly ignoring the fact that separate collection of waste, including toxic, does not exist in Russia as such, and apart from that, there’s been a record of generating capacity surplus. Hitachi Zosen INOVA director general Franz-Josef Mengede allowed himself, in an interview with Russian press, to assert that it is only 50% of solid waste that could be possibly sent to recycling plants, while the remaining fifty have to be incinerated – for which the company’s furnaces are perfectly fit, and they are ready to burn all the waste, even unsorted, because it is “safe”.

Hitachi Zosen INOVA Board of Directors does not only ignore European Commission recommendations to not implement new waste incineration plants there where they did not exist, it also pays zero attention to protests of the Russian public, which regularly take action against such plans. Locals of Moscow vicinities and Kazan’ have gathered dozens thousand signatures against constructing and using such plants there where is a need for plants that recycle polymeric material, waste paper, glass, metals and organics. Locals do want separate waste collection, but people are told that “Russian population is not ready yet”. According to a survey conducted by National Agency for Financial Studies analytical centre not long ago, numbers of people who are willing to collect their waste separately is constantly growing: 84% are prepared to do so provided there is convenient infrastructure and 17% of them do that already.