The authorities concealed information about the regions where Moscow garbage will be dumped

The Moscow Housing and Utilities Department has published a draft of a new territorial waste management scheme in the city. The document lacks information on which regions will be sent to the capital’s garbage. The current territorial scheme specifies which landfills and in which regions receive garbage, in the new project there is no such information. Now there is a note that the garbage will be accepted by “an object in another subject of the Russian Federation”, writes Kommersant.

The document says that 5.4 million tons of 6.8 million tons of garbage generated annually will be sent for recycling, incineration or disposal in landfills in other regions.

The annex to the project explains that “facilities in another constituent entity of the Russian Federation” include landfills and processing enterprises with which agreements were reached on the reception of waste from the capital. Dmitry Nesterov, an expert of the Zero Waste Project at the Russian branch of Greenpeace, believes that the information was hidden in order to exclude the possibility of new protests.

The largest of these protests took place in 2018 in the Arkhangelsk region, when the Commission for Investment Policy and Development of Competition in the region approved an investment project to create the Shies Eco-Technopark. It was planned to build a landfill to remove garbage from Moscow.

Rallies and actions against the construction of the Shies landfill began in August 2018. Local residents organized an eco-watch near the construction site in protest. Until the spring of 2020, thousands of protests were held in the region and in the neighboring Komi Republic.

In April 2020, the Governor of Arkhangelsk Igor Orlov and the head of Komi Sergey Gaplikov resigned. The appointed interim leaders of both regions stated that they do not support the project of the landfill in Shies. In October 2020, the investing company announced the termination of construction, and by the summer of 2021, Technopark promised to reclaim the territory. In early 2021, activists declared the protest over the landfill in Shies completed.