Moscow gives up waste incinerator construction plans

MOSCOW. March 16. KAZINFORM "No more waste incinerators will be built in Moscow; the Moscow government has changed its position on this matter," Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin declared at a meeting of the Moscow government on Wednesday. Kazinform refers to Itar-Tass.

A decision has been made not to build new waste incinerators in the city; garbage utilization should be based on safe technologies - deep garbage processing and dumping away from the city, the mayor said. Efforts will be continued to remove environmentally hazardous industries away from the city and build high tech industries in their place well adjusted to the environment, the mayor said. More green zones will be created in the city by means of reclaiming old city parks and trees hit by an icy rain in the end of 2010, Sobyanin said.

Chief of the Moscow city department for the environment Anton Kulbachevsky said that only 2. 1 million tons (12 percent) out of 17. 8 million tons of waste collected last year was processed. More than 80 percent of the overall waste was buried on dumping sites in the countryside, Kulbachevsky said. At present, we are considering the problem of equipping territories to be used as dumping sites, building waste processing facilities there and creating mobile and permanent waste collecting shops, Kulbachevsky said.

The Moscow department has been developing a modern concept of a waste processing industry based on technoparks - constructing modern waste processing enterprises and creating a network of facilities for collecting, sorting out and burning waste beyond the Moscow Ring Motorway ( MKAD). Kazinform cites Itar-Tass. See www.itar-tass.com