This March, the construction of the garbage recycling plant will start on the landfill site in Derhachi region, Kharkiv oblast.
Behind closed doors
It is expected that the construction of this enterprise will last for 3 years, and the World Bank allocated $44 million for it. According to the local authorities, the plant will sort, reclaim and recycle garbage from Kharkiv, and also to extract gas and to use it for power generation.
Of course, this waste management looks much more progressive than the burial of the mass of garbage on the landfill site, which is still practiced in Ukraine, including Kharkiv region. However, it seems very strange that this so important for the city community project is implemented behind closed doors, and the community of the megalopolis with the population of one and a half million is kept away from the solution of the matters of principle concerning city waste management, Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Feldman considers.
Let’s take for example the fact that this project is not available for the open access, as well as the assessment of its impact on the environment. Apparently, we must just take on trust what the representatives of the local authorities say about the fact that fires and ecological catastrophes are excluded on this type of plant. Meanwhile, the Aarhus Convention guarantees the right of all citizens to take part in the environmentally important decision making, and to obtain information about the decisions which must be taken. A garbage recycling plant is an environmentally hazardous object, and its project must undergo not only the state examination, but the public one as well, for the citizens to be sure that everything is stipulated in it in order to guarantee safety for the nature and for people. By the way, in the mid-1990s, exactly this allowed the caring public and scientists to detect gross violations in the project of the construction of a landfill site near the village of Sorokivka, Kharkiv oblast. And thanks to this, the ecological catastrophe was avoided.
The developers of the future garbage recycling plant assure that they spent almost four years on the development of its concept and tried to adopt the best world practices. It is planned to create 132 workplaces on the plant and to accept up to 1,500 tons of household waste every day (in any case, it is the amount of waste brought to the Derhachi landfill site now.)
Try to find!
From the point of view of business, this project may become quite successful, because recycling is a money-maker. It is much cheaper to melt a metal can than to find and exploit ore deposit and to extract metal from it. In order to produce plastic, it is necessary to have oil products, gas, complex chemical reactions… It makes all the difference when you just take one finished plastic product and transform it into another. There’s even no sense to talk about paper: we all know from the childhood that the salvage of waste papers literally saves our trees. Recyclable materials are considered much more profitable today than fresh raw materials, and the whole civilized world uses this.
But if we talk about the functioning of the future garbage recycling plant from the point of view of the common-sense logic, it turns out that the planned enterprise is doomed to be inefficient. Let’s start from the fact that the new enterprise was initially intended for acceptance of unsorted garbage, which will be sorted and separated on the conveyor belt.
Any of us can look into the dustbin or a trash container on the street and easily see that the plastic bottle that lies near the food waste doesn’t look very clean. And this dirty recyclable material is not so attractive for recycling as well. In Ukraine and in some other countries, there are restrictions concerning the share of impurities permitted in certain types of recyclable materials. In other words, if we are talking about the recycling of a plastic bag with the stump of an apple in it, it will never satisfy these requirements, because the weight of this stump is bigger than the weight of a thin bag. At the same time, a stump and an empty bag taken separately make the perfect material for recycling. An apple is a material for biogas and fertilizer production, while a bag is a material for the production of any other plastic products.
One may say that garbage sorting is stipulated on the plant in order to separate mixed wastes. But is it really can be efficient? Let’s imagine that even 100 persons will be working at the conveyor belt and tons of mixed wastes from Kharkiv will pass through their hands. It will be batteries, which must not get into the landfill site at all, because it is necessary to utilize them as hazardous wastes. It will be luminescent lamps, food waste, plastic packaging and so on. Of course, the workers will be able to sort something. But there still will be something they won’t be able to sort. So, try to find a tiny battery (which, by the way, contains a significant ‘dose’ of heavy metals, which are extremely harmful for the environment and for human life!) among the mass of stumps, broken glass and different junk. The same may be said about other items, which are valuable for recycling. Because there is a limit for human fastidiousness, for human patience. Therefore, the significant share of the potential recyclable materials will remain on the conveyor belt in order to later be buried on the landfill site. And we are talking now about tons of raw materials, about huge sums of money of Kharkiv residents that could be spent for the city’s benefit instead of decomposing on the dump.
Therefore, any conversation about wastes must start not with the construction of some enterprises or complexes, as they will definitely appear later, because it is a very profitable business. It must start from the separate collection of recyclable materials. And this process must start in the apartment of each resident. You will never find a person in the developed countries and in the richest cities of the planet who throws all wastes together into one dustbin. While in Kharkiv, almost each citizen makes this. We should admit the fact that in the question of waste management, there is no economy, no logic and no wit in our behaviour. The separate collection of waste is not a whim and not a luxury; it is a way to make our planet cleaner, and to earn where Ukraine loses today.
Recyclable material is money of the community
The transportation of Kharkiv’s garbage also looks not quite logical. Why is it necessary to take all the waste outside the city, to sort it there and then to transport the sorted recyclable materials back to the city for its recycling? May be it will be much easier and cheaper from the point of view of transportation costs to collect, for example, clean plastic in the city, to break it to pieces here and only then to take it to recycling.
In short, it is the way of spending as much money as possible without any control (as we don’t know how many bottles, metal and other recyclable materials are taken out.) But it is necessary for the community to control this process. The street and house committees must explain the benefit from the separate collection of waste to the residents. There is no need to search for example confirming this. Several years ago, the organized system of garbage disposal and payment for this according to the regulations was introduced in one of Kharkiv private sectors. There were a lot of residents who were against this initiative stating that they throw out nothing or throw out not so much garbage as stipulated by the regulations. If these people only had an opportunity to participate in separate collection of waste, there would be no problem and they would pay far less for garbage disposal. Perhaps there would be even some profit from certain recyclable materials. And this money could be spent on some improvement of the territory or repairing, etc. In any case, the residents could see the result of their efforts in waste sorting. However, the municipal authorities don’t want to create conditions for this, and the destiny of the city’s recyclable materials is determined behind closed doors, far from the eyes of the city’s community.
It should be noted that Ukraine recycles less than 6% of waste today. Switzerland recycles 51% (49% are burnt), the Netherlands recycle 65% (33% are burnt), and Sweden has 50% of pyrolysis per 45% or recycled products. It also should be noted that the process of combustion is not barbarous; it is safe, as they burn the separately collected components. In Sweden, they are so confident in their citizens that they know for sure that there won’t be batteries or other hazardous waste that can be harmful for the environment. In other words, they burn the garbage, which was sorted perfectly, and they know that it would not be expedient to recycle it in a different way. And there is already a shortage of this kind of fuel for their power-and-heating plants, so Sweden needs to buy it from the other countries. But it should be noted that they have so high requirements to the composition of waste they buy (as each type of fuel needs specific temperature conditions, filters to clean emissions etc.) that they will never take our garbage for these purposes.
One thing in this story in the most annoying: we lose time catastrophically. An American child, who goes to the elementary school for the first time, finds a quest in the first book, which demonstrates how certain kinds of garbage must be thrown out into specific refuse bins. In senior school, this schoolchild knows the ways of recycling of various types of wastes and the other important information. British and German children learn the same. As for Ukrainian kids, they are still deprived of this knowledge. Sometimes this information is given haphazardly at best. The introduction of at least partial separate collection of waste in one city (like Kharkiv) could also favour the gradual acquiring of useful and eco-friendly skills in waste management. But it seems that we still have long years ahead to introduce the civilized approach to waste disposal.
