Dirty question

June last year. The cultural capital of Russia is St. Petersburg, the arrow of Maly and Kamennoostrovsky avenues. At the exit of a small store, right on the sidewalk, there are worn, but completely intact sneakers standing at an awkward angle (heels together, toes apart). The third side of the triangle is formed by a gutted shoebox. Someone bought himself new shoes, went out into the street, changed his shoes in the middle of a dense stream of people, and went his way, leaving everything where he no longer needed it.

However, these are just my assumptions - unlike the scene that I witnessed in almost the same place a few minutes later. Around the corner, under the wall of the cultural center, three girls are sitting with guitars, at whose feet there is an open case with several coins. Naturally, they smoke. One of them finished smoking and immediately, without looking, throws the unextinguished butt towards the pavement - right through the crowd flowing in both directions.

Of course, a metropolis is a metropolis for the very reason that very strange actions take place in it from time to time. The problem is that actions like the ones described above are not performed from time to time and are not perceived as strange - at least by a significant part of citizens. This is eloquently evidenced by the even layer of garbage on our streets and lawns or bottles and cans merrily rolling in subway cars. And each of us constantly sees where it all comes from: in our country, it is customary to leave garbage where it has become garbage. Throw a finished cigarette away, place a finished bottle against a wall or curb, and simply let go of the paper or cellophane wrapper.

Strict standards of incivility

When it comes to such hygienic habits, almost everyone sees their root in lack of culture, bad manners and a general decline in morals. Many also add that, they say, nothing like this existed in Soviet times.

This explanation is more or less plausible when it comes to teenagers - from someone who is capable of outright vandalism, it is indeed difficult to expect efforts to maintain cleanliness on the streets. However, respectable, responsible members of society behave in exactly the same way. Several years ago, in one of our regional capitals, I talked with a university teacher - an intelligent, educated, non-trivial thinking person. During a conversation taking place at his home, the owner, having finished smoking another cigarette, sent the bull out of the open window with his usual movement. And to my surprised question: “What are you doing?” - answered no less surprised: “What did I do?!” He sincerely did not notice that he had performed any action - it was automatic, like blinking, like inhaling and exhaling.

That such manners are characteristic not only of the provincial intelligentsia, I quickly became convinced when passing by the famous cooperative of the Moscow Union of Artists on Malaya Gruzinskaya: not every dormitory of limiters could boast such a littered and trampled front garden. Moreover, it was quite obvious that it was not a horde of visiting fans or rioters who worked on it, but the residents of the elite building themselves - in particular, a piece of rotten orange peel stuck on the head of the bronze Vysotsky on a relief memorial plaque could only have flown from above, from someone’s window . The point, of course, is not about Vysotsky: no one is obliged to consider him a shrine, and in general, let’s imagine that he did not live here and has never been. But those people who so polluted the ground under their windows - they definitely live here. They invite the public here, to this house, and even bring buyers. And, apparently, they do not feel any mental discomfort.

Actually, this case is notable only for the fact that it was not just anyone who created the trash heap around their home, but artists - people who, in theory, are distinguished by a heightened sense of beauty and, in any case, in no way deserve the epithet “uncultured.” It is clear that if this is the cream of society, then its main part is no better. Look out the window of your own house, look down, and you will see - especially if the windows do not face the facade (in front of which the front gardens are more or less regularly cleaned) - that your neighbors also consider the window an alternative garbage disposal. Any undeveloped ravine, a copse among city blocks, a valley of a stream or small river has turned into a dump of household waste, and in any noticeable body of water - a river, a lake, a city pond - there are certainly old tires, bottles and the obligatory gas stove or refrigerator lying around. (Moreover, if the reservoir is used for swimming, then the highest concentration of waste is observed precisely around the most popular places of entry into the water.) If a residential building borders a forest, there is no doubt that the strip along the edge is a landfill. Why are there ravines, rivers, edges! In Moscow, Tarusa, Kozelsk, Nizhny Novgorod or any other Russian city, go out to the generally recognized observation deck, which offers the most popular view of the city, and look down the slope - what will you see? That's right - everything is the same.

By the way, the special attractiveness of certain places and objects for garbage (not related to waste collection, but often, on the contrary, particularly sensitive to pollution) again cannot be explained by “lack of culture.” If this were the case, the thickness of the garbage coating would be simply proportional to the flow of people flowing through a particular place. But ravines, copses, and forest edges are undoubtedly less crowded places than, say, courtyards or playgrounds. Of course, we must take into account that many of these places are, as it were, “nobody’s” - no one is responsible for maintaining cleanliness in them, and they are impassable for cleaning equipment. Therefore, the garbage thrown there is not removed, but accumulated. But the city forest parks are responsible for the same edges (the staff of which conscientiously, but unsuccessfully, tries to resist the ninth wave of garbage overwhelming them), and there is nothing to say about the ponds: they are small, accessible and always have an owner. However, they are always more cluttered than the surrounding areas - as if some unknown force encourages citizens, contrary to prohibitory signs and common sense, to throw all imaginable rubbish here.

Sometimes the action of this unknown force can be seen literally with your own eyes. The wonderful journalist Galina Kovalskaya once had the opportunity to participate in a certain Russian-Japanese mass event in the Kuril Islands. The program included a picnic in nature - after which, naturally, there should have been waste left over. The guests stocked up on garbage bags in advance, while the hosts preferred to send scraps and plastic to the nearest bushes. It got to the point of grotesque scenes: a Japanese expressively holds up a wide-open garbage bag, and his Russian interlocutor pretends to still eat something from a plastic plate - so that the moment the Japanese turns away, he still throws this plate into the grass.

I myself had to act as such a Japanese, convincing various types of outdoor enthusiasts to take their waste with them. My interlocutors were quite cultured people, some of them even provoked me to preach, loudly complaining about the filthiness of their favorite places. It would seem, what is the problem? You have a car, there’s plenty of space in it, I’ll give you a plastic bag now - at least load your own garbage into the trunk and take it to the nearest container, which you don’t care to drive past!

The first reaction is usually deep surprise. A person could anxiously find out whether it is possible to bury cans directly or whether it is better to first ignite them in a fire. But the idea that he could take all this with him seems absolutely absurd to him. Having made sure that they are not making fun of him, he begins to look for reasons why it is not possible to remove the garbage from here today. Naturally, there are reasons. And if not, your interlocutor will agree with you, but when you turn away, he will quickly put the bag into the bush and cover it with more branches. Or even load it into a car, but it will only take you to the nearest pit outside the line of sight.

This behavior cannot be explained by lack of culture, laziness, or irresponsibility. Such a persistent reluctance of the majority of members of our society to act in accordance with certain rules means only one thing - these rules run counter to the general cultural norm.

Fig.

Boundaries of the “bad city”

Here is the time to remember that all traditional cultures knew exactly one way to deal with waste - removing it outside the boundaries of the inhabited, appropriated, “meaningful” space. The size of human settlements, the quantity and composition of the waste they produced (a significant part of which was disposed of immediately upon generation: chickens and pigs were fed with bran, broken equipment went into the stove, etc.) were such that natural self-cleaning systems could cope with them quite well.

Fig.

This practice not only became established as universal, but also acquired an additional meaning: garbage dumps themselves became boundary signs, a visual expression of the mental boundary drawn by people between their own and someone else’s (“stranger” not in the sense of belonging to another owner, but in the sense of no one’s, wild) . However, “one’s own” space was zoned according to the degree of “property” (house, yard, vegetable garden, village territory - “to the outskirts”, arable land and pastures, etc.) - and different types of waste marked different zones. Suffice it to recall the widespread custom of sprinkling stove ash on the passage from the gate to the village street - the border between the territories of the family and the community. (Where this custom has been preserved, it is now understood as an anti-icing measure - but, firstly, it is slippery not only on this short path, and secondly, it is also sprinkled in the summer.) Actually, the practice of using waste to mark territorial boundaries much older than humanity itself. This marking is used by many animals: from dogs, with their well-known manner of marking vertical objects with urine, to hippopotamuses, who vigorously rotate their tails and spray semi-liquid manure along the boundaries of their land areas.

However, sooner or later, natural self-cleaning systems ceased to cope with the flow of garbage and sewage. In addition, materials that are difficult to decompose (metals) or cannot be decomposed at all (ceramics, glass) began to play an increasingly important role in the economy. Society, willy-nilly, had to entrust waste management to special services, limiting the “natural” right of its members to throw garbage out the window (behind which, for most citizens, “no man’s” territory began). It cannot be said that the new attitude towards garbage was established quickly and without conflict, or at least that by now it has finally triumphed. But still, the streets of European and American cities today are very far from the state in which they were one and a half to two centuries ago (see the article by Vera Milchina and Nadezhda Plavinskaya “Parisian scents of the era of enlightenment and romanticism” in this issue). This became possible due to the fact that in Western culture, along with individual space, there has always been a community space, which was perceived as not entirely our own, but certainly not someone else’s or anyone’s. The only problem was to spread this perception over very large areas - a metropolis or even the entire country.

This is precisely what is categorically absent in Russia: for its residents, “their” territory is limited to an apartment and a summer cottage, or, at best, to an entrance (in their own entrance, it is really mostly teenagers or completely asocial types who litter and dirty things). Sometimes they say that “behind the threshold of the apartment the country begins immediately” - meaning precisely the absence of real communities and municipalities in Russia. But this is also incorrect: for a Russian, a country is rather something transcendental, existing outside of everyday experience. A country is a name, history and myths, it is a president, politicians and other characters from TV (including athletes), it is a coveted “order” that should exist, but which still does not exist. And beyond the threshold of the apartment, behind the entrance door, something begins that has no meaning, no law, no value. A certain environment, alien and even partly hostile, into which, however, one has to regularly immerse itself, since it is a source of resources necessary for life.

Do you recognize? This is the “wild”, absolutely external space of traditional culture, the very place where waste products are supposed to be sent. Not only because I don’t feel sorry for him, but also to define the boundaries of what is lived-in and meaningful. A bottle through the window, a bull under your feet, plastic dishes in the bushes - this is like the beginning of the development of the territory, indicating your presence on it.

Therefore, the efforts of city cleaning services not only do not encourage citizens to more civilized waste management, but on the contrary, they reinforce the existing archaic model. Firstly, this external concern constantly reminds the residents that they are not the owners of even the front garden under their own windows (what is the point, say, of planting flowers in it if the utility worker inevitably comes with a lawn mower and chops everything grass into silage, no matter how much you explain to him difference between nettle and mallow?). Secondly, by cleaning, utility workers return to the space its most important property - “wildness”: the garbage thrown into it miraculously disappears somewhere in the end. Thus confirming that the place in front of the house is the “wild” periphery, which needs to be tamed and reclaimed by garbage.

Why rivers, ponds, ravines, forest edges, ditches and rights-of-way are so attractive for dumping waste is also understandable. All these heterogeneous elements of the landscape are united by the fact that they are boundaries. Transferring waste through them is unconsciously felt as a correct action that organizes the world. Reservoirs are especially clear in this regard: gurgling! - and the garbage instantly disappears, absorbed by an alien element. (That’s why the ponds and rivers of Russia inevitably turn into garbage dumps, even if they are fenced off by a continuous palisade of prohibitory signs.) Almost as good is the road that God himself ordered to serve as a border. It doesn’t matter what with what: in the village of Guryevo near the famous Tarusa, housewives regularly took the garbage “off the road”, dumping it into a ditch on the opposite side of themselves - right under the windows of houses standing on the other side of the road, whose inhabitants got rid of their waste in the same way . The edge of the forest also works great - the border of the forest, which even in the guise of an urban forest park is perceived as another alien element opposing the developed space (a characteristic detail: almost all the garbage at the edge is lying on its forest side). If the physical nature of the border does not allow it to be easily overcome, the waste is piled close to it - as Gogol noted in the famous tirade of the Governor: “...near that fence, forty carts of all sorts of rubbish were piled up. What a nasty city this is! just put up some kind of monument or just a fence somewhere - God knows where they’ll come from and they’ll do all sorts of crap!”

In light of what has been said, it no longer seems strange the stubborn reluctance of summer residents and picnic lovers to take their waste to the city - that is, to return it from the “wild” space to the developed one. Such an action directly contradicts the most powerful cultural norm and is therefore psychologically impossible, no matter how rational the arguments in its favor. Many other persistent phenomena become clear. For example, in any depressed or dying Russian city, covered with many years of garbage snowdrifts, you can find a spot where there is not a single cigarette butt lying around - the courtyard of a functioning church.

One thing remains unclear: what to do about it? It is clear that trying to free oneself from archetypes at once is a hopeless task: the most powerful social institutions, inspired by the highest ideas, have achieved little along this path. Another possibility is to learn to perceive the world as, albeit peripheral, but still part of the developed and habitable space, and to drive the “chaos zone” into the underworld, represented in the visible world only by entrances in the form of toilets and trash cans. This is more realistic, but the question is the timing. The path from a member of a tribal community to a citizen of the Earth took the peoples of the European ecumene not even centuries, but millennia. We simply don't have this time.

But any decision is always preceded by a problem statement. Everything said above about the structure of space, about boundaries, about cultural norms is well known to both anthropologists and ethnographers, but not to those who professionally solve waste problems. Perhaps this is even more true for environmental activists: almost all of them, regardless of theoretical views, live in a world of regulations, economic schemes, technological solutions, almost without thinking about the role of the cultural-psychological archetype. Some policy statements of the Greens can even be understood as a denial of such a role: they say that the problem is not with citizens at all, but exclusively with careless officials and self-interested businessmen. “The main obstacle to organizing separate waste collection in our city is, oddly enough, not the lack of culture among citizens, but the reluctance of administration officials to work with residents to solve this most pressing environmental problem,” we read in a document from one of the regional offices Greenpeace Russia. In a more general form, this idea was expressed by the famous scientist and environmental activist Alexei Yablokov: “behind every environmental problem in Russia, the interest of an oligarch or state monopoly is revealed.” If this formula is quite fair for the oil or nuclear industries, then applying it to the problem of household waste is reminiscent of searching for a key not where it was lost, but where there is light.

Fig.

Negative product

Nevertheless, no matter how large the deposits of uncollected waste may be, most of the garbage we produce ends up in the system of organized collection and disposal of municipal solid waste (MSW).

In Moscow, a two-stage removal scheme has been adopted: well-known garbage trucks deliver the contents of garbage cans to transfer stations, where they are compacted, loaded into even larger vehicles and sent to the so-called “domestic waste landfills.” Generally speaking, only high-tech facilities should be called this way - with reliable waterproofing from below, an annular gutter around the perimeter, a system for removing gaseous decomposition products, a waterproof coating on top, weight and radiation control, etc. To structures that more or less correspond to all of these requirements, in Russia today, perhaps only one can be attributed - the “New World - ECO” training ground in the Gatchina district of the Leningrad region. There are also very few objects approaching this bright image. Most of the landfills are, at best, primitive Soviet-built storage facilities (but at least they have some kind of waterproof bedding and are somehow controlled), at worst, they are ordinary landfills. Almost any of them could be closed for non-compliance with sanitary standards - but then there would be nowhere to transport garbage, and today it is almost impossible to monitor compliance with the ban.

Fig.

Landfills are independent commercial enterprises. Their main source of income is payments for waste collection and disposal. Waste coming from the residential sector is paid for by DEZ (as in Moscow) or the city budget (as in St. Petersburg). In any case, this fee is small: in Moscow, for each ton accepted, the landfill receives about 90 rubles. Organizations and institutions (as well as housing cooperatives and homeowners associations) pay for waste removal at negotiated prices, which are usually several times higher than those established for the residential sector. Therefore, offices, especially small ones and those renting premises in residential buildings, strive to dump their waste into communal tanks - which is strictly prohibited, but nevertheless widely practiced.

In St. Petersburg, part of the garbage goes to the so-called “mechanical processing plant.” Here, waste is loaded into a temporary storage facility and “composted” (in other words, they wait for what can rot to rot). After this, large fractions (metal, pieces of plastic, etc.) are removed from them by mechanical sifting. The remaining compost should, in theory, be used in urban farming as fertilizer or simply as soil. However, landscapers categorically do not want to take this product, saturated with heavy metals, hydrocarbons and other savory seasonings, so in reality it is taken to the same solid waste landfills and, in the best case, filled sectors are covered with it on top instead of soil. Nevertheless, such pre-treatment is useful: composted waste does not emit explosive methane, does not sag and takes up much less volume in landfills. Of course, it costs money: for every cubic meter of waste, the plant receives 122 rubles, while the landfill receives 41.

At first glance, everything is logical, fair and market-based: there are service providers, and there are clients who need them. But a waste economy can also be thought of as a kind of negative market, in which the supplier of a “good” pays the recipient to take it. Since neither the carrier nor the final recipient needs the “goods” either, they are always tempted to take money without fulfilling their obligation - to dump the garbage being removed in the nearest roadside forest. In the first half of the 90s, unauthorized landfills of various sizes around cities were a real disaster.

The answer to this problem was the currently adopted export control system. In general terms, it looks like this: the first link in the chain - the owner of the containers - receives a certain number of coupons from the DEZ. Each consists of five tear-off parts and corresponds to a certain standard portion of waste. When handing over the contents of the tanks, the utility worker keeps one part of the coupon for himself, the remaining four go to the driver of the garbage truck. The second part remains with him, the third - at the transfer station, the fourth - with the driver of the “big” garbage truck, and the last - with the landfill operator. Participants in the chain will receive their money only when all five pieces of paper are collected again in the DEZ, thereby confirming that the garbage has been delivered to its intended destination.

This system (supported by the environmental police created in Moscow) more or less coped with the “Christmas tree removal.” But the price for this was its extreme clumsiness and immunity to new technologies. Since it is not possible to establish personal or door-to-door waste accounting, the volume of generated waste (and, therefore, the required number of coupons) is determined by multiplying the number of residents of the serviced area by a certain standard (for Moscow - 1.44 cubic meters of waste per person per year). It is difficult to say on what basis this figure was adopted. But even if it exactly corresponded to the volume of waste produced by the average city dweller, it in no way reflects the fact that in large cities there are always many unregistered residents. In addition, as already mentioned, the non-residential sector (not only offices, but also retail outlets) always strives to push its waste into the general trash heap. In reality, for every officially registered Muscovite, for example, there is about 2.5 cubic meters of garbage per year. As a result, coupons and the money behind them are chronically in short supply—especially at the end of the year. Perhaps this is why the primary accounting of garbage is carried out not by weight (what it is is what it is), but by volume - in cubic meters. Garbage is a rather loose substance (average density is about 200 kg per cubic meter), and if you jump on it well, you can usually fit into the standards. When this is not enough, utility workers look for another way out, which often turns out to be arson.

Another consequence of this system is the desire to close “our” containers for “other people’s” garbage. Sometimes it takes on grotesque forms. I know of a garden cooperative that is very conveniently located: on the shore of a picturesque and convenient lake for swimming. Next to it are two more similar partnerships, and the borders between them are tortuous and whimsical, like the borders of the Central Asian republics. Since there were no places for waste collection during the construction of the settlements, all waste ended up in a large pit under the outer fence of the cooperative, separated from the lake only by a road embankment.

In the end, the first cooperative entered into an agreement for garbage removal - and placed two large containers on its territory, reliably protected by a strong fence. They say, why should we pay for other people's garbage? Let the neighbors also work hard, arrange for removal, and let the “savages” on the beach go wherever they want. What happens to the lake where their children swim is of concern to summer residents (non-poor people for whom paying for an extra trip for a garbage truck is certainly not ruinous) is much less of a concern than considerations of justice. Ultimately, the problem is again not economics or technology, but cultural norms and values.

From earth to heaven and back

It is not difficult to see that the industrial technology of waste management actually comes down to their removal outside the territory of the settlement (i.e., again, “one’s own space”) and burial there. True, it has two fundamental differences from similar technologies of traditional society. Firstly, the chemical composition of modern waste does not allow us to hope for its complete and safe degradation (filled landfills are supposed to be reclaimed over time, but even if this is done in compliance with all standards, an elite holiday village will never be built there). Secondly, the territory to which waste is transported is not “nobody’s”: it belongs to another municipality, which, naturally, is not eager to give it up for someone else’s garbage - at least without appropriate compensation.

The fathers of various Russian cities saw a way out of this impasse in waste incineration plants (WIPs). The solution seemed simple, radical and clean: firstly, the plant, no matter how much garbage you carry into it, occupies a limited area. Secondly, the lion's share of urban garbage is flammable materials. True, most of them must first be dried, but the calculations seemed to make it possible to organize the process in such a way that the garbage, when burned, dried itself. With proper organization of the matter, one could even hope to receive additional heat and energy into city networks. But perhaps the main thing that incineration fascinated Russian (and not only Russian) officials is its ideal correspondence to cultural archetypes: waste disappears before our eyes, and the smoke that remains from it goes into the sky - which is certainly no one’s space and is not developed.

Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why the idea of ​​“fiery burial” of waste, despite its obvious imperfections, is still so popular among city managers. Not all waste components can be oxidized (burned) to neutral low molecular weight products. Heavy metals, for example, remain toxic in all their compounds, and when burned, some of them can also become volatile. Fire disposal often itself generates poisons, and extremely dangerous ones at that - in particular, the famous dioxins, for which safe concentrations could not be determined. It is difficult to guarantee complete (excluding the formation of dioxins) combustion of household waste: the humidity of this substance is not only very high, but also varies over a very wide range. It is necessary to use oxygen supply (and in August, when the share of fruit and vegetable scraps, especially watermelon rinds, in the garbage cans sharply increases, to supply natural gas as well) and install very powerful cleaning systems on the MSZ pipes. As a result, the cost of waste disposal at MSZ turns out to be an order of magnitude higher than at landfills: 1,320 rubles per ton. True, service companies pay only a little more than 50 rubles, the rest is provided by the city budget - otherwise not a single sane utility worker will deliver anything to the “stove.” But with such a price ratio, the temptation to send garbage to a landfill, passing it through the papers as disposed of at an incineration plant, is very great. According to independent experts, this is what is happening: the only actually working Moscow “stove” in the Rudnevo industrial zone near the Kosino district processes several times less waste than its capacity allows.

The most annoying thing is that the substance, which you have to get rid of with such difficulty, contains a lot of valuable things. According to Greenpeace, 35-45% of urban waste consists of materials that can be profitable, or at least break even, in extracting and recycling. Another 30% is food and other biodegradable waste, which can be turned into compost, producing biogas as a by-product. It is not possible to make this technology self-sustaining today, but it is still possible to compensate for some of the costs. Finally, 20-30% falls on the so-called “tails” - used diapers, condoms and similar materials, the recycling of which is either impossible in principle or requires prohibitive costs.

However, deep processing of household waste still remains the subject of assessments, calculations, projects, and, at best, experiments at advanced sites. A material that in itself can be a very valuable raw material, when placed in the same pile with other substances, becomes of little interest to anyone. Paper or cardboard mixed with wet food waste cannot be recycled into anything more valuable than compost. In the general heap, the corrosion of scrap metal accelerates, metal ions leak from discarded batteries (thus poisoning the biodegradable fraction), etc. But even if the material has the chemical resistance of glass, its reuse is possible only after separation from all other substances. This process is very difficult to mechanize - and manual labor of this kind is poorly paid (due to low productivity) and morally unattractive.

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There is only one way out: to shift this operation to the population by organizing separate garbage collection. Surveys and experiments show: 15-25% of city residents are ready to put garbage in bins without any prodding, if they are provided with one. This is enough to start such a practice - in the hope that the absolute majority of residents will gradually join it. The experience of Germany and other European countries shows that this is, in principle, possible.

In Moscow, experiments on separate collection were repeatedly carried out, but all of them conflicted with the coupon control system and the orientation of Moscow departments towards combustion technology. Things are somewhat better in St. Petersburg, where the director of the special transport plant (one of the two main city waste carriers), Anatoly Yazev, was inspired by the idea of ​​separate collection (see interview with him in this issue). However, any initiatives of this kind run up against the fact that Russian industry, spoiled by cheap primary raw materials, is very reluctant to work with secondary ones.

Experts hope that in the coming years, when the shortage of raw materials is felt by the rapidly growing industry of the “newly industrialized” countries - primarily China - the situation will change. I really want to share these hopes, but life experience gets in the way. In the 80s of the last century, having come across another pile of rusty metal somewhere in the forest, we dreamed: there would be a normal market economy in the country, citizens not only would not dump anything into the forest, but also, lo and behold, this scrap they will take them to recycling collection points...

The country's economy has long been a market economy. There is no less rusty iron in the forests and fields. And numerous recycling collection points are successfully working to deelectrify the entire country: unwinding wires from poles turned out to be a much more effective task than collecting unwieldy, dirty pieces of iron.

There is no doubt: no economic situation and no technology will change anything in the future if the cultural norms of society work against them.

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