In which regions of Russia will Moscow garbage be dumped?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

After the garbage riots that took place in the Moscow region in 2018, several landfills and landfills were closed here, and Moscow has nowhere to put the garbage. The construction of the Shies landfill has already begun in the Arkhangelsk region, but this is not the end of it.

As Meduza found out, they want to take garbage from Moscow to the Kaluga region, to other districts of the Arkhangelsk region and several other regions of the European part of Russia. In Moscow, three transshipment complexes are being built to package this waste, one of them is inside the Third Transport Ring, not far from the Volgogradskiy Prospekt metro station. Meduza's special correspondent Ivan Golunov talks about the plans of the Moscow mayor's office to remove garbage to other regions of Russia.

940 dump trucks that no one saw

Over the past year, several large landfills (Kuchino in Balashikha, Tsarevo near Sergiev Posad, Kulakovsky and Syanovo in the south of the region) have closed due to protests in the Moscow region, which annually received about 1.3 million tons of garbage.

In the summer of 2018, the governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, said that the Moscow region dumps can receive up to 4.6 million tons of garbage per year. Residents of the Moscow region throw an average of 3.8 million tons of household waste and about 1.5 million tons of bulky waste. In the Moscow region, there are about 20 sorting stations, which receive about 880 thousand tons of waste per year.

According to the Ministry of Ecology of the Moscow Region, 14 operating dumps in the Moscow Region can only accept 3.7 million tons of garbage per year. This hardly covers the region's own needs, but there is definitely not enough space for Moscow garbage - and this is still a few million tons.

Every year Muscovites throw out almost 8 million tons of household waste and another 2.4 million tons of bulky waste (old furniture, household appliances, garbage after apartment renovation). In the capital, there are three waste incineration plants with a capacity of no more than 770 thousand tons per year and several sorting stations designed for about 2 million tons per year.

To solve the problem at least in part, the Moscow authorities last year allocated 3.4 billion rubles for the opening of the Malinki landfill on the territory of New Moscow, where more than 1 million tons of waste could be buried annually. But because of the outbreak of protests, Sergei Sobyanin decided to "mothball" the construction.

As a result, without taking into account the garbage left within Moscow after sorting, each year more than 6.6 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) have to be removed outside the Moscow Ring Road. In recent years, two landfills have been opened in the Vladimir region and one each in Tula and Smolensk, but according to the documents, they can only accept up to 910 thousand tons of garbage per year. There is still at least five million tons of garbage left. To remove such a volume, about 940 dump trucks are needed daily.

Six companies, which under contracts with the city are engaged in garbage collection, do not disclose information where they take garbage after the closure of most of the landfills near Moscow. At the same time, in the Moscow region and neighboring regions, the number of complaints about the appearance of illegal landfills has sharply increased recently.

Improvement in exchange for garbage

In mid-October 2018, the authorities of Moscow and the Arkhangelsk Region announced the creation of the Shies Eco-Technopark. The capital's garbage will be taken to the railway station of the same name on the border of the Arkhangelsk region and the Komi Republic. According to officials, in Shies it will be possible to bury about 500 thousand tons of waste annually within 20 years. As can be seen from the presentation of the project, there will be no construction of a waste sorting and processing plant in Shies. The waste will be sent by rail, in the form of compressed briquettes, wrapped in film. The authors of the advertising video for the project cite as an example the packaging of luggage in plastic wrap - as is done at airports.

The Arkhangelsk region was chosen because there are railways that do not carry too much cargo. So far, there is an agreement on a daily route from Moscow to Shies for a freight train of 56 gondola cars, a source at Russian Railways told Meduza. The gondola car's carrying capacity is 70 tons - thus, Moscow can annually send about one and a half million tons of garbage to Shies.

Residents of settlements neighboring Shies have been holding rallies and protests since the beginning of August. One of the reasons was the publication of a departmental telegram from Russian Railways on the opening of the Lyubertsy - Shies route for the transportation of household waste from Moscow. In response to the protests, the city authorities promise to invest money from the city budget in the repair of communal infrastructure and the improvement of villages located near the future landfill. The Moscow mayor's office also plans to launch an advertising campaign on TV channels in the Arkhangelsk region and in social networks. In particular, several employees of OJSC "Moscow Information Technologies" attended the meeting of officials of the government of Moscow and the Arkhangelsk region. This company is engaged in informational support of the City Hall in social networks. It was her employees who published posts and wrote comments in support of the renovation program.

Such attention of the mayor's office to the Arkhangelsk region is explained by the fact that, in addition to Shies, several more landfills can be built here for burial of the capital's waste.

As it became known to "Meduza", they intend to build another test site in the village of Nimenga, 10 kilometers from the coast of the White Sea. According to a source familiar with the project, the ecotechnopark will be built in the former quarry of the timber industry, not far from the railway station. According to Rosreestr, this section belongs to Russian Railways and can be used "for railway transport enterprises." Institute "MosvodokanalNIIproekt" plans to announce a tender for engineering surveys for the development of design documentation for the "Ecotechnopark" Nimenga"

Garbage elections

Even a few landfills in the Arkhangelsk Region will not solve the problem of burying and processing Moscow waste. Therefore, Moscow officials are looking for ways to overcome the resistance of residents of closer regions.

At the end of January 2017, a delegation from Moscow headed by the head of the Moscow Department of Housing and Utilities Hasan Gasangadzhiev arrived in the village of Mikhali, located in one of the most sparsely populated districts of the Kaluga Region - Iznoskovsky. They said that they are choosing a site for the construction of a waste recycling plant. A week later, on February 5, a gathering of local residents took place, at which almost all of them opposed the construction of a solid waste landfill and demanded not to change the purpose of land from agricultural to industrial.

Officially, the question of changing the purpose of land plots was to be decided by the deputies of the rural duma. However, local deputies also did not agree to change the purpose of the land and refused to schedule public hearings to change the general plan of the rural settlement. Then on August 24, 2017, the district administration dissolved the village duma and appointed new elections. Also, any public gatherings were prohibited, with the exception of two permitted places - in the regional center of Iznoskovo and in the village of Myatlevo, 45 kilometers from Mikhali.

On the eve of new elections, scheduled for May 27, 2018, the population of the village began to grow rapidly: if on January 1, 131 voters lived in Mikhaly, then by May their number had grown to 241 people. Judging by the protocol of the election commission, even there they were not ready for such an increase and only printed 230 ballots. As the activists found out, most of the new residents were registered in two village houses, whose owners have long lived in Moscow. Along with the number of voters, the number of candidates also increased. If in the last elections eight candidates applied for seven seats in the Duma, then in 2018 the number of applicants increased to 26 people.

The election commission refused to register six deputies of the previous convocation due to inaccuracies in the documents. Of the seven new deputies, only two were registered in Mikhaly, and the rest were businessmen, owners of construction companies registered in Moscow or Kaluga. Aleksey Tyurenkov, a resident of the regional center, an employee of one of the departments of the Ministry of Economic Development of the Kaluga Region, became the head of the Council of Deputies.

Soon after the election, the new deputies called public hearings on the transfer of part of the land for the construction of the Kaluga Ecotechnopark. According to the project developed by MosvodokanalNIIproekt, 1,600 hectares will be allocated for the creation of an ecotechnopark. There will be a waste sorting complex, a plastic processing plant, a complex for the generation of heat and electricity and a greenhouse for growing vegetables. However, so far we are talking only about the first stage of construction - the creation of a site for the disposal of non-utilizable waste of hazard classes 2–5.

It is planned to bring 1.378 million tons of garbage to the Michali landfill annually. After the completion of the construction of the waste sorting complex, the volume will increase to 1.813 million tons; a little more than 900 thousand tons can be buried at the landfill. The total capacity of the landfill should be 40.1 million tons of waste, which is supposed to be stored for 46 years. The designers do not specify what will happen to the waste at the end of this period. The customer for the construction of the Ecotechnopark is ProfZemResurs LLC. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the main owner of the company is Mosvodokanal OJSC, owned by the Moscow government. The head of the ProfZemResurs company is a former employee of the Moscow Construction Department, Oleg Pankratov, who is also deputy director of Technopark LLC, which leases land in the Arkhangelsk Shies.

The Arkhangelsk and Kaluga regions are not the only ones where the Moscow government can dispose of household waste. Two sources in the Moscow mayor's office told Meduza that sites in several other regions are being considered for garbage disposal, in particular in the Yaroslavl and Kostroma regions. Negotiations on garbage disposal in these regions are underway, a source at Russian Railways confirmed to Meduza. The project in the Kostroma region was previously mentioned by Aleksey Sitin, deputy chairman of the Council for the Study of Productive Forces under the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation: “I know one place - this is the former reserve headquarters of the ground forces near Kostroma. There are about 500 square kilometers in total, together with access roads - including railways - and there are a variety of disposal options: bunkers, open space, and so on, he says.

The organization of the landfill on this territory is a project of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Last year, the department created the Federal State Unitary Enterprise "Oboronpromekologia", which is engaged in a project to create waste processing plants on the territory of empty military units. "Negotiations with the military are underway, but they are sluggish at the initial stage," a source in the Moscow government claims.

Slaughterhouse Complex

To take garbage out of Moscow, it must be packed and loaded. During the presentation of the project in Shies, Moscow officials spoke about the construction of a loading cluster on the territory of the Lyubertsy treatment facilities in the Nekrasovka area. However, as Meduza found out, similar complexes are also being built in other Moscow districts, for example, in the industrial zones in Chertanovo and Taganka. According to the documents, they are being built by the same companies that are creating new landfills in different regions.

On October 23, the MoszhilNIIproekt Institute, owned by the Moscow Mayor's Office, placed a tender for the development of design documentation for ventilation for the Industrial Loading and Unloading Cluster, which is being built on the territory of the abandoned Boynya railway station near the Volgogradskiy Prospekt metro station. It is about 450 meters from the construction site of the future complex to the nearest residential buildings. According to the terms of reference, ventilation must clean the air from dust, ammonia, dihydrosulfide, hydrochloride, benzene, hexane and other substances. Earlier, a ventilation project with a similar technical task of the structure of the mayor's office was ordered for another loading and unloading cluster located in the Moscow district of Nekrasovka. A Meduza correspondent who visited the construction sites of the facilities was convinced that their sizes on Taganka and Nekrasovka completely coincide. According to Rosreestr, at the end of August 2018, Mosvodokanal JSC transferred the territory in Nekrasovka to the Profzemresurs company, which is creating a solid waste landfill in the Kaluga region.

Meduza was unable to find contracts for the construction of loading and unloading clusters in Moscow, as well as landfills in the Arkhangelsk and Kaluga regions. However, the law enforcement agencies did not find permits for the construction of facilities either. But in the process of searching, it turned out that the construction of the landfill in the Kaluga region and the cluster on Taganka, apparently, is being carried out by one organization close to the Moscow mayor's office.

In the Kaluga region, due to the lack of permits, the police fined the organization Road Group LLC, which was conducting construction work. Workers at the construction of a loading and unloading cluster on Taganka, in a conversation with Meduza's correspondent, refused to say the name of the company, but for “contacting the management” they gave a phone number that coincides with the contacts of Road Group.

In addition, in the Arkhangelsk Shies, workers told local activists that they were hired by the Moscow State Budgetary Institution "Automobile Roads" (responsible for the repair and maintenance of streets in the capital).

Road Group was registered at the end of 2010. Less than a year later, the company won the largest contract for 522.6 million rubles under the program to replace asphalt with paving slabs on the central streets of the city, initiated by Sergei Sobyanin. By 2014, Road Group became the largest contractor of the State Budgetary Institution Automobile Roads to replace asphalt and curb stones on the main streets of Moscow. As RBC found out, about a third of the contracts of the State Budgetary Institution Automobile Roads are received by Road Group and related companies. In addition, the holding took part in landscaping under the My Street program. After a series of RBC publications about Road Group, the main owner of this company was Arctic Invest JSC, which does not disclose its shareholders.

Most of the founders of the Road Group now hold posts in the Moscow mayor's office. Alexey Eliseev, who owned a 25% stake in the company, has been heading the capital department of capital repairs since 2016 - the department oversees the My Street program. Alexey Menshov (owned 25% of the shares) holds the post of deputy head of the State Budgetary Institution "Automobile Roads". And the former co-founder and director of Road Group, 36-year-old Mikhail Nesterov, according to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, was the first general director of Technopark LLC, which now leases the territory for the construction of a landfill in Shies.