On December 20, Russian President held his annual media conference and responded to numerous questions, including one on waste management and waste sorting, presidential web page reported.
According to the journalist, not a single city in Russia has either the industry for separate trash collection, or a culture of waste sorting, and even though some regions have already begun building the appropriate infrastructure, this is all a drop in the ocean.
“The situation is complicated, but the answer is simple – we have never dealt with it,” Vladimir Putin agreed. “For decades, we have been dumping garbage in pits, to put it colorfully. No one has ever engaged in its processing, unless minimally in certain areas, while we produce 70 mio tons of trash annually, and there is no place to dispose of it. The amount of waste tends to increase. As chemistry progresses, the amount of plastic trash increases.”
In his view, “We need to eliminate illegal landfills, create a waste treatment industry, create conditions for separate trash collection and subsequent recycling.”
“We must build 200 waste treatment plants before 2024. I am not sure this will be enough, but we must have at least 200 such plants in our country,” he concluded.