Seriously or in pretence? The government has brushed off to waste incineration plants

What would this mean for the participants of the "garbage" market and the Russians, Novye Izvestia was trying to find out.

Lyudmila Butuzova

The official shared her opinion in Instagtram, expressing quite sharply that waste disposal plants pose a threat to the environment and, moreover, are a waste of budget money.

“While we are talking about a project of more than a dozen“ platinum ”waste incineration plants, which are actually proposed to be paid from the federal budget and from the tariff for the population (for electricity or garbage collection), she wrote. -Will not work. Why do we need expensive electricity and "gold" waste? In the form that we have now [the construction project for 25 plants], it is definitely not supported".

The population of large cities - from Crimea to Narym, shocked by the plans to build "death factories" under their very nose since the spring of the past, can take a break - if the threat has not passed, then, judging by the statement of Abramchenko, has been paused.

Another question is why this was not done earlier, back in May last year, when RT-Invest announced plans to build new incinerators with a capacity of 14.6 million tons and 1.5 GW in the largest agglomerations and tourist centers? Moreover, the agreement on cooperation "within the framework of the investment program for the construction of 25 incinerators" was signed not by some secret ill-wishers of the fatherland, but by comrades who are quite brave and not alien to the government - the chairman of VEB Igor Shuvalov, the heads of Rostec and Rosatom Sergey Chemezov and Alexey Likhachev.

VEB, according to Shuvalov, was ready to allocate 200 billion rubles for the project, Rostec offered to finance the garbage plants at the expense of eco-collection. Atomenergomash - to provide the project with its engineering division. The total cost of the project throughout the country was tentatively estimated at 600 billion rubles; to date, the total volume of investments, with significant state support, is declared at 1.3 trillion rubles.

It is possible that the consortium's appetites, which doubled over the year, overwhelmed the government’s patience and splashed out with public discontent against the trickier of the venture - the company Rostec. In addition, it turned out that due to financial problems associated with the pandemic, the company indefinitely postpones the launch of 5 incinerators, which are being built in the Moscow region and Kazan. But at the same time it takes on "increased obligations" for construction of new factories in Petersburg, Crimea, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Volgograd, Ufa, Perm, Krasnodar, Krasnoyarsk and other cities. An interesting detail: the consortium members generously gave the final location of the facilities to the regions, which had to independently enter into a dialogue with the federal government and beg for money from it to promote the idea of incineration on their lands.

And what, so it was possible? In the absence of a federal waste management scheme, there is no idea how many incinerators are needed per country, and how their appearance will affect the declared priorities of the waste reform - separate collection, sorting and recycling of waste?

“Before accepting such projects for the whole of Russia, we must see how these plants will generally work and what kind of ecology will be, - says Anna Dmitriyeva, the coordinator of the Ecologika movement, outraged, - RT-Invest is already building five waste incineration plants in the Moscow region and Kazan with a total capacity of 3.35 million tons and 355 MW. They are due to launch in 2023, but the documentation for all incinerators is kept secret, even despite the court decisions in our favor".

We insist that a public environmental review of all incinerator projects should be carried out. The inhabitants of the region will put themselves and their children at risk by no means hypothetically, and we are not even allowed to get acquainted with the data on which our health directly depends. But we have to be content with only the information that RT-Invest considers it necessary to provide.

It should be noted that RT-Invest prefers to use the definition of “waste incineration power plants” (MTPP) in relation to its incinerators, since electricity generation is expected as a result of MSW incineration. Why does Rostec climb into someone else's diocese? And does Russia need additional energy? Such questions were asked by various media, in response, as a rule, they cited either a reference to China, which already has 286 factories and is building 60 more, or to international statistics indicating the massive construction of incinerators with power generation. There are 1,795 such factories in the world. with a total capacity of 216 million tons of waste. Greenpeace responds to the thesis that Russian incinerators also intend to generate "green energy" - electricity, that Russia is already producing an excess amount of energy, thanks to hydroelectric power plants and thermal power plants built during the Soviet era. And in Europe, energy is bad, it is not enough. By the way, that is why garbage from neighboring countries is bought up there - to burn and warm up, and not to recycle. We are promoting 30 factories - crematoria under the guise of a "new" social project - the electrification of the country. 30 factories will process about 18 million tons of waste (15% of the total volume of garbage in the country) in case the “Ilyich's lamp” goes out somewhere?

At the request of Novye Izvestia, the Ministry of Energy replied that this issue was not discussed with the Ministry of Energy, it was not coordinated, and the department, for its part, does not support the initiative in question. The Association of Energy Consumers said to Novye Izvestia: “We are against the construction of waste incineration plants at the expense of additional payments for electricity, regardless of the amount. Ordinary consumers will not suffer, but for business any amount will be a heavy burden". Environmental projects need other sources of funding, the organization believes.

Nevertheless, waste incineration is now considered as energy utilization in accordance with amendments to Federal Law No. 89-FZ “On Production and Consumption Wastes” adopted in December 2019.

“This raised a lot of questions among ecologists, but there are no ecologists among the State Duma deputies”, - said Oleg Mitvol, who is currently engaged in the disposal of industrial waste, including toxic, and is the chairman of the board of directors of JSC Polygon.

Which of the State Duma deputies was important about these "little things and squiggles" from the ever-protesting environmentalists, if the amendments to the garbage law had much stronger defenders. They were defended by the head of the Ministry of Natural Resources Dmitry Kobylkin, by the way, after his resignation from the ministerial post, the elected deputy secretary of the General Council of United Russia. In this position, Kobylkin was again instructed to deal with party projects, in particular, the environmental direction and the "Clean Country" project. The author of the amendments to the law and also the ideological pusher of incineration was and remains a businessman, the permanent senator from Kalmykia, Aleksey Mayorov. Are there many non-lobbyists among our people's representatives? Perhaps those who accidentally overslept the meeting or, just in case, “abstained”.

Meanwhile, the public initiative "For the refusal of incineration and for the prevention of waste generation", posted on the ROI on the Internet, is addressed primarily to the Duma majority and requires the immediate restoration of the violated legislation in the field of waste management. Namely - a return to the maximum use of raw materials and materials, the prevention and reduction of waste generation, their treatment (sorting) and priority over projects aimed at incineration. To date, the petition has received 76,000 Russian votes. It is believed that it takes 100,000 to get the attention of the federal authorities. The statement of Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko sounded earlier than the coveted figure, and, presumably, it is evidence that the government shares public concern and is ready to revise the priorities of the garbage reform. But, as the deputy of the State Council of the Republic of Tatarstan and co-founder of SPP PromIndustriya LLC Nikolay Atlasov stated in his blog, “the waste recycling declared within the framework of the 'garbage' reform is impossible without amending the legislation. If the law remains in its current form, with any reshuffle in the government, risks with a substitution of priorities will resume".

Anna Garkusha, a representative of the Moscow-based Separate Collection Association, also believes that the legislators approached the problem from the wrong side:

"We have a hierarchy, that is, we must first apply all measures so that we do not have non-recyclable waste. And if we applied them, if the regulatory and legal framework contained these measures, then the desire to build 25 incinerators would not arise, because there would not be such a volume to build such capacities".

With all the heat of the discussion around the incineration plant, which began after the harsh statements of Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko about their threat to the environment and the budget, the feeling that this is just a banal steam release does not leave. Everyone spoke out, everyone came to the conclusion, one way or another, that the waste reform itself, as well as the waste management technologies that are embedded in it, do not meet environmental safety and economic efficiency. Everyone agreed on the starting point: in order to achieve a normal ecology, the emphasis should be on high-quality waste sorting facilities. So what? The government has a plan to change situation? For some reason it is not presented. It is impossible to consider a public showdown with Rostec, which is trying to grab the fattest piece from the reform, leaving the country with a hundredfold increased environmental problems.

TO THE POINT:

According to the Accounts Chamber, we recycle only 7% of waste, while in Germany - 48%, in the USA - 34%. In Russia, as before, 90% of waste is sent to landfills, that is, to landfills. Moreover, by 2024, the possibilities of these landfills will be exhausted. And against this background, there are calls to carry out reclamation and incineration at the expense of the population.