Waste management in Russia
[1] Throughout its existence, the government of the Soviet Union introduced state-wide legislative frameworks and recycling programs for effective waste management in the pursuit of a circular economy to reduce new material production.
[2] However, the dissolution of the Soviet Union consequently erased these initiatives, yielding the onset of a Post-Soviet Russia largely dependent upon landfills for waste management.
[4] The Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resource Usage stated in the same year that landfills in Russia occupied an area roughly equivalent to the size of the Netherlands.
[8] To maximally preserve the supply of raw materials, the reuse of new products was heavily emphasized through the establishment of state-run organizations that provided collection services.
[3] Consumer goods did not feature materials as plastic, aluminum and tin throughout the vast majority of the Soviet Union's existence, although these were common in other global markets.
[9] In 1986, the government of the Soviet Union introduced the concept of extended producer responsibility within the state to hold organizations accountable for their waste production through a legislative framework.
[3] The newly formed Russian Federation sought to instigate mass reform in the waste management sector to revive the success witnessed under the Soviet government.
[13] Operators and personnel seeking to handle hazard classes between 1 and 4 require waste management licenses administered by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology.
[3][22] Similarly, the federal government issued an official decree in 2011 ordering regional and local authorities to devise and implement sustainable waste management programs.
[4] The Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resource Usage stated in 2019 that landfills in Russia occupied an area roughly equivalent to the size of the Netherlands.
[4] Outcome no.1 of the National Project on Ecology is “Clean Country”, which represents the objective of removing all 191 of the illegal landfills identified by the Russian government in 2018.
[27] Across several oblasts of Russia, leachates from landfills have been observed to contaminate groundwater with hazardous constituents such as heavy metals and toxic chemicals, reducing biodiversity and soil fertility.
[28] Mass protests erupted in Russia in 2018 when over 200 schoolchildren were hospitalized from inhaling poisonous gas emissions originating from a landfill in the town of Volokolamsk in Moscow Oblast.
[7] In the concluding months of World War II, the Soviet government designated the islands of Novaya Zemlya as testing grounds for the development and trial of nuclear weapons.
