Who is going to sweep for us?

The Ministry of Regional Development and Building of Ukraine plans to increase the charge for garbage removal. This was recently announced by the First Deputy Minister of Regional Development Oleksandr Alipov. According to him, an average tariff for solid domestic waste disposal in Ukraine is 35 hryvnias per one cubic meter. Each Ukrainian citizen pays five hryvnias for it (the payment is included in the utility bill). The ministry thinks this is too little and that is why our streets are so dirty. “If we want to live in clean cities, the tariff increase is inevitable,” Alipov says. His calculations show that if the charges for garbage removal are increased at least twice, our streets are going to become significantly cleaner. The ministry stresses that this is an affordable price for cleanliness. “According to our estimations, people can afford to pay 10 hryvnias a month for waste removal,” Alipov says.

The representatives of waste disposal enterprises share deputy minister’s position. “Prices for energy sources are constantly rising in Ukraine,” says Petro Semko, head of the small private enterprise Rada. “Tariffs have to cover expenses on fuel, vehicle amortization, wear and tear of the equipment.” Moreover, the representatives of garbage removal business state that Ukrainians who sort waste have to pay extra for this. According to Viktor Rzhotkevych, head of the supervisory council of the private joint-stock company HrinKo, a tariff for waste sorting has to be established. He calculated that if the cost of waste removal and burial has to be approximately 50 hryvnias per one cubic meter, the tariff for waste sorting has to be no less than 20 or 30 hryvnias per one cubic meter. Rzhotkevych thinks that those who do not sort waste, should be fined. “It is impossible to persuade everyone verbally. That is why the fines should be imposed,” he says. So, there is only one way out: if you have trash, you have to pay.

We want to appeal to officials and businessmen that 15 or even 20 hryvnias can be charged monthly to keep the streets clean. But who guarantees that they will be cleaned? Today each importer who brings goods to Ukraine has to sign a contract with the state enterprise Ukrekoresursy, according to which the latter undertakes to find, sort, and utilize the package of the goods that are imported, and the businessman is to pay for the process. About 98 percent of the goods that are imported to Ukraine have package. This means that each month Ukrekoresursy receives approximately 10 million hryvnias. And where is the result?

Environmentalists are sure: no matter how much we pay, the trash is not going to disappear. On the contrary, it may become even worse. “Raising the garbage removal tariffs twice or even 10 times is not going to improve the situation,” says Tetiana Tymochko, head of All-Ukrainian Environmental League. “The price increase does not motivate those who remove garbage to introduce waste sorting, which is the primary task now.” The state has to motivate garbage removal companies to sort the waste and recycle the useful part in order to avoid the overload of landfills. They are already overloaded, so the government has to try their best not to aggravate the situation.

The world already knows the price of garbage. And they know how much money can be made in trash business. There is even a couple of Hollywood movies featuring the waste mafia in the US. So why recycling is not profitable in Ukraine? “Because today it is easier to steal the money and stack tons of trash at the dumps,” underlines Tymochko. It is much more harder to develop clear economic mechanisms that would solve the matter. Perhaps, that is the reason why our 20-year-old country still has no single system of trash disposal. And those who want to create this system, have their hands tied. “But the investors are going to fight for Ukrainian trash in the near future,” the head of All-Ukrainian Environmental League predicts.

Even now foreign businessmen show their interest in Ukrainian garbage. However, instead of competing with each other on the market, they are trying to fight bureaucracy and corruption. One of those fighters is Kadem Ergul, founder of the company Turk Ambalaj. The Day’s reporter met him at the investment forum in Turkey. The businessman stated that he would like to invest in Ukrainian national project “Clean City.” “We want to invest in waste recycling plants. We are interested in such large cities as Kyiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, and Odesa,” Ergul shared his plans with The Day. “If we can arrange a deal, within five years we are ready to invest in the construction of five plants.” According to him, the construction of one such plant would cost almost 10 million dollars. Because instead of just stacking garbage, the Turkish businessman wants to make money from it and produce useful things out of it. For example, very few Ukrainians know that PET bottles can be used for production of plastic pipes and other building materials. And juice cartons make good material for making light metal constructions. The recycled matter can be used to produce pens, notepads, and even tableware. By the way, there are a few successful projects that use recycled materials (Tetra Pak company recycling plant near Kharkiv, waste recycling plant near Kyiv, etc.), but as of today, these examples are but exceptions from the general scene.

The Turkish businessman thinks that there is no such thing in Ukraine as waste disposal market. This is is due to multiple reasons, like the absence of organized system of garbage collection, low environmental awareness of the population, and negligence. But in a year or two the waste disposal industry will finally get to Ukraine and that is when a real war for Ukrainian trash is going to start. The businessman is sure that those who comprehend the value of this market and occupy the niche in time, are going to reap a profit. And the potential of this market is high here.

Oleksandr FIL, deputy chairman of the public council for ecology issues, Ternopil City Council; the public council member, the State Environmental Inspection in Ternopil oblast; chairman of the board of trustees, Ternopil Regional Environmental-Naturalistic Youth Center:

“This is a long-standing problem for Ternopil residents. It is not about taking the trash out of the city, but about the need to utilize it, and also to assign a new landfill for solid domestic waste. Because despite the numerous shutdowns, Malashevska landfill is still being used. And it is one of the worst sources of environment pollution in the region. Though the city administration acts as if the society knows nothing of their decisions and intentions in this area. At first they were discussing a possibility of creating one waste utilization line, now they are talking about another one, and the information on where it is going to be installed varies. Concerning the garbage collection itself, the situation has gotten worse since the present city authorities did not carry on all the positive initiatives of the previous government. For example, they did not continue the promotion of the waste sorting, which would help to collect the materials that can be reused. This is the way garbage is handled in the civilized countries. But now we see that containers for glass were taken off the streets. The previous Ternopil garbage disposal company that basically introduced these positive initiatives was removed from the market. And the one was put in its place illegally: there was no tender invited, and so on. We discussed this matter at the meeting of the public council at the State Environmental Inspection of Ukraine in Ternopil oblast.

“If we talk about the whole Ternopil oblast, there are some positive changes: the trash dumps and solid waste landfills are being brought to order in many districts. But because of the environmental unawareness of the citizens there is a huge number of illegal waste dumps. They are the most frequent near rivers and ponds, and this causes one more problem: water pollution, which in turn has a negative impact on the people who pollute the environment, and unfortunately, they do not understand this.

“It is necessary to involve experts in order to communicate to people. That is why I should stress that increasing environmental awareness is the primary issue we are trying to solve.”

Interviewed by Larysa OSADCHUK, Ternopil