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2023:80% of household waste is littered in Russia

In Russia, about 80% of household waste is sent to landfills. Such data analysts FinExpertiza published at the end of December 2023.

According to the study, in January to November 2023, 79.9% of the total mass of all generated household waste was allocated for burial. A year earlier, this figure was 81.1%, and for the same period in 2021 - 86.7%. According to the national project "Ecology," by 2024 the share of littered garbage should decrease to 87.9%.

According to experts, the leaders in the share of garbage reuse are Moscow (52.9%) and Moscow region (50%), Oryol region (43.5%), Ingushetia (35%), Ulyanovsk region (33.4%), Kamchatka (33%) and Stavropol (31%) territories.

About half of the regions have reduced the share of household waste disposed of at landfills. Most noticeably - in the Bryansk region (by 40.9%), the Sverdlovsk region (by 18.9%) and the Stavropol Territory (by 14.3%).

In a tenth of the regions, the rate of buried garbage has not changed. Basically, these are subjects with a complete lack of the necessary infrastructure for MSW management, which, like a year ago, are sent to the burial of 100% of educated MSW: Karelia, Dagestan, Altai Republic, Tuva, Khakassia, Magadan Region.

By 2030, the rate of disposal of municipal solid waste (MSW) is planned to be reduced to 49.8%. This means that over the next seven years, the share of garbage sent to landfills should decrease by an average of 4.3 percentage points per year, said Aghvan Mikaelyan, member of the board of directors of FinExpertiza, at the end of December 2023. As for the sorting level, in January-November 2023 it amounted to 52.7%, exceeding the target of 50.2%. Recycling rose to 12.7%, also beating the planned 12.1%.^[1]

2022

Domestic waste volume grew by 3.8% to 363 mln cubic meters.

At the end of 2022, the volume of solid municipal waste (MSW) production in Russia reached 362.9 million cubic meters, which is 3.8% more than a year earlier. Compared to 2018, the figure increased by 32%, according to analysts at BusinesStat, whose data was released at the end of December 2023.

According to the researchers, the increase in the production of municipal solid waste in the Russian Federation is due to several factors, including:

• increased consumption of disposable goods;
• increasing the number of packages;
• insufficient awareness of the importance of the waste problem by the population;
• need for their disposal.

The study also notes that the main increase in the production of municipal solid waste in Russia occurred in 2018-2020, when the production of solid waste in the country increased by 23% and reached 340 million cubic meters. The prevalence of disposable goods contributed to the high growth rate of waste volume. This trend has intensified in 2020.

During the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, people spent more time at home and produced more solid household waste, such as food packages, masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment. In connection with quarantine measures, the number of packages and plastic containers for the delivery of food and non-food products at home has increased, analysts add.

According to their calculations, about 40% of municipal solid waste is organic waste, more than 30% is waste from paper and cardboard, another 10% is plastic waste, the remaining 20% is waste from other materials. However, it is worth noting that such a structure of MSW is characteristic when measured in weight, and from the point of view of volumetric measures it will look different. Organic waste is characterized by more weight and less volume than waste from plastic, paper or cardboard. In this regard, in the volume structure of solid utility costs, plastic, paper and cardboard will account for significantly more than 30% of the weight they occupy.^[2]

Regions of the Russian Federation with the largest number of illegal landfills are named

By the end of 2022, the most illegal landfills in Russia were in Bashkiria. This was reported in June 2023 in the audit and consulting network FinExpertiza.

According to the study, the authors of which refer to the data of Rosprirodnadzor, by the end of 2022 there were 901 landfills in Bashkiria. The second line of the rating was taken by Buryatia with an indicator of 849 objects. The Orenburg region closed the top 3 of the list, where 787 illegal landfills were counted. Below in the list are the Astrakhan region (630 landfills), the Komi Republic (540 landfills) and the Chelyabinsk region (513 landfills).

According to experts, in 2022 the number of unauthorized waste dumps in Russia decreased by 17%, or 2.6 thousand objects. The total number of illegal landfills in Bashkortostan (-921 objects), Chelyabinsk region (-525), Perm Territory (-406), Samara Region (-294), Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (-283), Nizhny Novgorod Region (-224), Sverdlovsk Region (-201), Leningrad Region (-164), Volgograd Region (-148), as well as St. Petersburg (-148).

In total, 16.43 thousand illegal landfills were identified in 2022, while 16% more were eliminated - 19.04 thousand objects. Liquidation work was most actively carried out in the Moscow region - there local authorities reported on cleaning up 2125 objects from garbage, as well as in the Sakhalin region (1693 landfills were liquidated), Ryazan region (1279), Perm Territory (1263), Nizhny Novgorod region (1118), Bashkortostan (1075), Chelyabinsk region (646), Pskov region (574), Leningrad region (512) and Samara region (511).

Rosprirodnadzor classifies unauthorized landfills as territories used for the disposal of production and consumption waste (including municipal solid waste), but not intended for this and not equipped in accordance with the requirements of legislation in the field of environmental protection and ensuring the sanitary and epidemiological well-being of the population. The landfill is distinguished from a simple accumulation of garbage by large areas and volumes of disposed waste - more than 10 square meters. m or more than 5 cubic meters. meters.^[3]

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