Translated material
Puffers
The stench from burning landfills strangles Saratovites
According to the president’s promise, by 2024 in large cities, 200 illegal dumps with an area of more than one hectare will be eliminated and the number of plants for sorting and processing waste will be built. According to Vladimir Putin, now 1.1 thousand garbage training grounds are “in a more or less normal state”. With the launch of a new environmental national project in the fight against garbage, high technologies will be used. When the president talked about solving the garbage problem on a “straight line”, two landfills lit up on the outskirts of Saratov at once-at the village of Zorinsky and at the Guselka-2 river. Since the beginning of June, the townspeople complain about smoke and an unbearable smell. Rospotrebnadzor assures that no harmful substances were found in the air. Regional officials say that landfills do not burn at all, but only smolder.
Little forgotten old
There is no fence around the closed Gusel training ground. Broken asphalt ends at the raised barrier. Above along the slope - heaps of trash that had eaten from time to time. Window frames, bags, glass wool, bottles, tires. Officially, the landfill does not work, but the garbage is clearly pouring: among the old shapeless waste, brand new syringes, multi-colored tubes with something brown, cow bones are lying. Signs of fire are not visible, but from the depths of the landfill pulls Garya.
Only by walking along the landfill on foot, you can evaluate its size. This is a huge space with a complex relief, hillocks and ravines. Having crossed the top that lies with a dog skull, we find ourselves in a real meadow with wet grass and young plums. Among the thickets, the pit darkens. Looking down, I understand that this hill is not at all natural origin.
Under us is a five -meter layer of garbage. Inflaiming, this thickness can burn like a peat swamp - for decades.
The rolled primer goes into a white dense veil. As in a cheap horror, smoke is approaching a continuous wall, clinging to the ground. It smells of something chemical. Breathing is difficult. We put on masks. Finally, we go to the place of extinguishing, where, according to regional officials, 23 units of heavy equipment were thrown. An old bulldozer clangs at the wind -up edge of the conflagration, rolling out fresh clay. Naboted KamAZ unloads the next pile of soil.
Through the black crust of charred garbage, jets of smoke break through every two to three meters, lights flare up. The visible focus of the fire is not very large, but the smoke is incredibly many. The Saratovites post photos of a multi -kilometer “tail” in social networks: laying down the lowlands, smoke goes around the village of Yubileiny and descends to the Volga. The smell spreads even further: at night it smells of burning plastic even in the center of the city, 12 kilometers from the landfill.
The trash on the Guselka-2 river appeared in Soviet times. The new lines of the training ground opened in the 90s. The garbage was already burning then, but the city microdistricts did not exist for the anniversary, and the troubles of the villages of the Saratov region, suffocating from toxic smoke, were not interested in anyone. In 2010, the operator of MUP Spetsatsath admitted that the landfill was full.
According to the Federal Law “On Waste of Production and Consumption”, the burial of waste within the boundaries of settlements is prohibited. The Saratov authorities solved the problem elegantly: in 2012, the city Duma changed the borders so that the Guselsky landfill ceased to be considered part of the village. Ecologists warned that this is self -deception. But for public hearings, mandatory for the adoption of the general plan, by buses, state employees were brought by buses, and the protesting social activists did not have enough space in the hall.
“The people are stuffing cones, but they do not study anything. Teachers who participated in that farce six years ago already see what their actions led to. But this summer, they also obediently nod at a hearing in Koumiss Polyana, as a result of which part of the forest can go under buildings, ”says an independent ecologist Olga Pitsunova (a public organization that she headed was declared a foreign agent in 2014).
Officially, the Gusel training ground was closed 4 years ago. In 2016, the Saratov environmental prosecutor's office filed a lawsuit demanding to carry out a reclamation.
They will not let the garbage calmly lie down
In the days of distribution of presidential promises, the Saratovites are not lucky. On May 7, when a decree was signed, including affordable housing for Russians, the wall of the hostel collapsed in Saratov. A month later, at the Direct Line, Vladimir Putin promised that 200 modern waste disposal plants will be built in the country until 2024. On this day, a landfill on the village of Zorinsky caught fire.
The lowland of the turn on the landfill is covered with smoke. The road from gravel rests on a garbage plateau. It begins to rain, but it will not get such a volume of garbage. The mountain is completely smoked with haze. Orange and blue trucks are taken along the slope. A red -haired cloud stretches behind each machine - the soil assembled for extinguishing is blowing out of open bodies. The wind tears a notebook from the hands, but does not carry the smell: the rot here stinks even more than on the hussel. This is a valid landfill, the waste was carried here to the last, even when it began to burn.
In social networks, the Saratovites talked about a fire on the first evening. Regional officials arrived only on the fourth day of the fire. However, officials prefer the word "decay". It is reported that “smoke is reduced by double” and even more hectares are even faded than burned. The regional department of Rospotrebnadzor assures that nothing harmful was found in air samples taken in the sunny, zonal, anniversary villages. Rosprirodnadzor began administrative production under Article 8.2 of the Code of Administrative Offenses “Non -compliance with environmental requirements for waste management”.
The landfill operates LLC STM-Capital. According to representatives of the organization, the current fire is the work of dissatisfied residents who do not want to adjourn the garbage dump.
The Saratovites complained more than once to work "STM capital". For example, in 2012, residents reported to the regional environmental protection committee that chemicals were imported to one of the landfills located at the village of Red Tekstilsk. The check found 50 wooden boxes with unknown substances at the landfill and 70 canister with sharply smelling liquid. Representatives of the operator said that the forbidden waste was "placed unknown persons." Two days later, a fire broke out at the training ground, boxes and canists burned.
At the end of 2017, the Saratov Commissioner for Human Rights was addressed by Zorinsky’s summer residents with complaints of smoke and an unpleasant odor from a landfill. As reported on the Ombudsman website, Rosprirodnadzor came to the conclusion that "the capacity of the solid waste landfill." The administrative protocol was transferred to the Saratov District Court "to resolve the issue of suspension of the training ground." But the landfill continued to work.
The wind brings out garbage smoke to elite cottage villages in the suburbs. According to the “new” businessman Mikhail Avilov, the landfill is on for 10 years, “but this year is a clear bust”:
- In past years, we turned to different instances. The prosecutor's office of the city and the Saratov district reply that there is no corpus delicti. The city administration says that this is the territory of the district. The area is that it is urban garbage.
As the businessman notes, the situation bothers "many serious, influential people living here." Every day they go to the training ground to make photo and video shooting. We ordered an independent study of air samples in one of the expert institutions of Samara. Mikhail Avilov on his Facebook page announced the preparation of a collective appeal to the president. However, the owners of cottages are ready to extinguish their civic activity at any time. “We are waiting for movements from local authorities,” Avilov explains. “If they start working, we will calm down, and this will not go anywhere.”
Assemble, but do not mix
As they said in the regional Ministry of Natural Resources, due to the fire, taking garbage at the training ground in Zorinsky was suspended. The waste from Saratov is directed to the two remaining legal landfills-in the Alexander career (it is operated by the MUP "Dorozhnik") and near the village of Yeremeyevka (exploits the company "Vector-N"). The transportation of garbage in the city is engaged in 11 companies. Moreover, they make it so bad that the photo of crowded containers almost every day appear in the Saratov media.
Next year, new rules of waste management will begin to apply in Russia. Each region should choose the operator at the competition and approve the scheme on which the path of garbage from the tank to the landfill or the recycling plant will be indicated.
In Saratov, the regional operator for waste management will begin work on August 1. The competition was won by the company "Waste Management", which is part of the structure of the Criminal Code "Leader". According to observers, the company's arrival in the region was welcomed by Governor Valery Radaev. At electronic auctions announced by the operator, 5 new garbage carriers were determined (among them were merchants from Smolensk, Cheboksary and St. Petersburg). They will deliver waste from all regions of the region to waste loading stations, which will become a transshipment point on the way to the sorting plants built by a concessionaire in Balakovo and Engels. At the factories from the total mass, recyclables should be taken away, and the rest should be chopped and buried at the landfill.
The recycling of recyclables in the Saratov region is not developed, that is, it will have to be sent to other regions (in total, according to official estimates, 8% of waste is processed in the country). Many doubt that the carrier will want to drive a garbage truck for 200 kilometers, for example, from Balashov to the transshipment station in Saratov and pay for unloading. It is much cheaper to dump everything in the nearest forest.
In total, there are 11 licensed landfills in the region. The number of unauthorized landfills is estimated in different ways-from 300 to 500. According to the environmental prosecutor’s office, it follows from the new law that regional operators should process not only “fresh”, but also old waste from closed and illegal dumps.
According to the ecologist Olga Pitsunova, "the combustion of landfills is inevitable, since there is no separate garbage collection in Saratov, there are paper waste and organic, which emits methane."