[Russia] - Poisonous Moscow Region Waste Facility Sparks Grassroots Resistance

INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
"You sleep at night and suddenly wake up, just out of the blue
noticed the smells of landfill gas in the spring of 2020
But when I was exposed to a strong emission, I broke out in hives all over my body."Among the other conditions encountered by Anna and other
residents while living near Yug, one of the country's largest waste management sites, have been watery eyes, a metallic taste in their
mouths, headaches, stomach pains and even vomiting.In a show of public defiance to official policy that has become less common in recent
years, Anna and others in her community are opposing the harmful impacts of the waste complex near their homes.Yug is just one of several
regional officials boast that it is an environmentally friendly alternative tothe shuttered Volovichi landfill, a major waste dump that
AgencyUnwilling to tolerate issues ranging from suffocating odors to dark water discharges into a local river, Anna and the other local
activists have resorted to legal actions, holding multiple meetings with various government bodies and staging rallies when the authorities
pollution limits near Yug by several substances
For hydrogen sulfide alone, a toxic gas resulting from the decay of proteins, maximum allowed concentrations were exceeded 476 times between
September and December 2022 and 611 times in the first half of 2023, according to an official document obtained by The Moscow Times.The odor
issues might stem from the fact that garbage is still being dumped as it would in a landfill in the vicinity of Yug, as videos posted by
locals and public reviews of the facility suggest.Still, Yug representatives are not in a rush to acknowledge and fix the problem, Anna
council noted the absence of consistent measures to curb waste generation, opaque waste management schemes and escalating social tensions
stemming from the crisis
and Moscow region Governor Andrei Vorobyev open a waste processing plant in Myachkovo in 2019.Igor Ivanko / Moskva News AgencyRecent
year by the area of a few big cities
But besides official ones, there exist around 12,500 unauthorized waste dumps in Russia, the government data suggests.Unlike landfills,
facilities like Yug attempt to extract raw materials such as aluminum and plastic from mixed waste for recycling, but still fail to do so on
a significant scale
This is due to the lack of separation at the collection stage in urban courtyards, according to an independent expert in the field who chose
aiming to reduce by half the amount of garbage going to landfills by 2030
Because the program does not specify particular ways of achieving that goal, Russian regions could resort to controversial methods such as
waste processing
However, in reality, this is not the case, as it entails the destruction of non-renewable resources
more importantly, in shifting the focus to reducing waste generation altogether
to grasp effective measures for waste reduction
This issue is not given the appropriate attention, unlike in the European Union, where they have long realized that it is the right
This month, the community appealed to Governor Vorobyov in a video this month featuring real children going outside in gas masks and writing
only did we close the landfills, but we also rehabilitated them through a federal program
that her parents had specifically chosen her current suburban dwelling as an environmentally healthy place to live away from Moscow, Anna