Smoke over the flags

A “garbage volcano” has become active near Novorossiysk, on which fuel oil from Anapa can burn

For about six months, near Novorossiysk on Mount Shchelba, a garbage dump has been burning almost continuously. Next to the landfill there is a cemetery with the largest burial site of SVO participants in the region.

Thick smoke slowly creeps onto the flags flying over the graves. The stench from a burning landfill can be felt 20 kilometers away. Local residents with bitter irony call Mount Shchelba a garbage volcano.

Residents of Novorossiysk and the village of Borisovka, located next to the landfill, have repeatedly contacted both Kuban Governor Veniamin Kondratyev and President Vladimir Putin about the burning landfill. This did not give any results.

“I remember that in the eighties Novorossiysk was choking from cement dust, and now from a burning landfill,” residents complain.

Apocalyptic footage of a landfill burning is spreading across the Internet, scaring tourists away from Novorossiysk. It burns in winter and summer, in rain and sunny weather.

Environmentalists claim that the process of internal combustion of the landfill is almost irreversible.

Well-known ecologist Evgeny Vitishko, in an interview with Yasno in February, explained the reasons for the almost continuous burning of the garbage dump on Mount Shchelba: “The reasons remain the same as before. This landfill was initially laid out incorrectly - in a pyramidal shape, which is completely inconsistent with current legislation. Because of this, they cannot even get close to it normally for exploitation. They loaded it as much as they could, and now they are forced to redistribute the garbage by laying roads on it to prevent further collapses. But this is only a temporary measure that only makes the problem worse.”

The pyramid-shaped landfill collapses again and again. As a result of collapses, oxygen gains access to the smoldering depths of the landfill, which leads to combustion. Environmentalists are unanimous: the process of methane accumulation in the layers of the landfill will occur constantly and lead to combustion. They tried to extinguish the landfill with water, after which the filtrate from the landfill ended up in the Ozereyka River and reached the Black Sea.

It cannot be said that the authorities are doing nothing at all about the burning landfill in Shchelba.

In 2024, after a fire at a landfill, a criminal case was opened against the director of Terra-N LLC, which is the operator of the landfill, under an article on violation of the rules for handling environmentally hazardous substances and waste - Article 274 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The head of Rosprirodnadzor, Svetlana Rodionova, then promised to achieve the closure of the landfill. According to her, the landfill's capacity was exhausted in May 2023. After 10 years of hyperactive exploitation.

They really intended to close the landfill, but they didn’t close it; they decided to carry out reclamation and expanded it to include twenty hectares of forest land to carry out reconstruction and reclamation.

The expansion of the landfill causes particular indignation among residents of Novorossiysk.

In May of last year, residents noticed fuel oil fractions in the sand brought to the landfill and assumed that the sand was from Anapa. During fires, this sand was used to cover hot spots in the landfill in order to block the access of oxygen to them.

Residents of Novorossiysk were especially concerned about how the combustion of fuel oil would affect the composition of the air.

In the area of ​​Mount Shchelba and in the village of Borisovka, during fires at a landfill, Rospotrebnadzor regularly observes an excess of MPCs - maximum permissible concentrations - of harmful substances in the air. The excess is recorded in suspended solids, soot and carbon monoxide. In such cases, Rospotrebnadzor recommends that residents avoid open air, do not open windows, carry out wet cleaning and use masks.

Last year, the landfill on Shchelba changed its owner.

A project for reconstruction and reclamation of the landfill worth 1.2 billion rubles was developed. The reclamation was planned to be completed by the end of 2025, but something went wrong. The dates have changed.

In January of this year, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Government Dmitry Patrushev visited the Schelba Mountain landfill. During the meeting, he noted that the planned time frame for reclamation of the landfill must be strictly observed. Soon after the Deputy Prime Minister left, the landfill caught fire again.

On February 16, Mayor Andrei Kravchenko, speaking to deputies, said that under current conditions, reconstruction and reclamation of the landfill is impossible, since the landfill reconstruction project requires the demolition of half of its body and the creation of a site for temporary waste transfer. “It is impossible to reconstruct the facility in these conditions and carry out reclamation,” the mayor concluded.

He blamed the former owners of the landfill for all the problems. “They squeezed everything they could out of this facility and made maximum profit, without thinking about quality sorting, without allowing public members,” the mayor said.

The social activists themselves now recall how the same mayor Kravchenko gave them his word several years ago that he would not allow the expansion of the landfill. However, with the adoption of the new general plan of Novorossiysk, 20 hectares of forest land were cut off for the landfill.

The mayor noted that with the arrival of a new owner in 2025 - the federal structure PPK REO - a lot has changed at the landfill: the new owner installed a second sorting line, today up to 10% of waste is sorted. According to the mayor, this is 5-10 times more than before.

In February, environmentalists and social activists visited the landfill.

“We were at the test site,” writes environmentalist and resident of Novorossiysk Tatyana Tribrat in an ecologists’ chat: “My opinion: everything is bad. They will change teams (this is the third one) and will not be able to offer anything radical to solve the problem. It is already clear that they are planning to expand the landfill to 20 hectares, make new maps there and operate them... If they expand the waste to 20 hectares, new maps, then they plan to operate the landfill for another 5 to 7 years in the same mode as now.”

The director of the landfill, according to Tatyana Tribrat, admitted that the facility is very complex. There are not enough workers there. There are two times less of them than needed. Local residents are called to work sorting garbage. They promise 50 thousand a month. It has been decided to send the sand brought from Anapa for examination.

The landfill, which was designed to hold one million tons of waste, has already received more than two million tons. Now it is expanding and continues to burn almost continuously.

Alexander Romanov