You're reading: Environment suffers from lack of recycling

Toxic household waste gets tossed out as rubbish

Environmentally-unfriendly Ukraine, with its pollution-belching and energy-guzzling factories, is no better when it comes to recycling toxic household waste. Those who try face a long hunt for a firm that can help – and a hefty bill.

Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world where it is impossible to recycle electrical batteries, which are among the most poisonous items of household waste. Most of them end up in landfill sites. Other toxic items, such as energy-saving light bulbs, can be recycled, but at a cost of money and time.

“The small batteries contain acid salts and heavy metals, like lead or cadmium. Heavy metals pollute the ground and get into the underground water, later to wells, and this way they come to us,” said Volodymyr Boreiko, head of the Kyiv Ecological and Cultural Center, adding that heavy metals are carcinogenic.

Apart from batteries, computer processors and monitors, energy-saving light bulbs, automobile batteries and mobile telephones thrown away together with common rubbish pollute the environment and harm human health, ecologists warn.

Ukraine imported in 2010 about 300 million of batteries and over 1 million energy-saving light bulbs, the country’s customs service reported.
There are no functioning national or local programs for recycling batteries.

In 2005, Kyiv’s mayor ordered local officials to organize a special center for collecting batteries and processing them. But this good idea remained solely on paper, and six years later nobody in the Kyiv city administration was able to say who was in charge of toxic rubbish recycling in the city.

“What do you do with spent batteries? Throw them away. I do the same. And the other people do so, too,” said Vitaliy Pshenychny, head of the department for emergency situations of Kyiv city administration. “Why do you want to know more about this?”

It is possible to recycle energy-saving bulbs in Kyiv through the company Demikon, but only for companies, at a cost of Hr 4.20 for each bulb.
One luminous lamp contains from 3 to 150 milligrams of toxic mercury, one gram of which is able to pollute 3.3 cubic million meters of air and 200,000 cubic meters of water, experts say.

If you need to recycle electronic rubbish, including computers, laptops or television sets, you will face exactly the same problem. There are very few centers that accept it, and they mainly work with companies but not individuals. And if you are lucky enough to find them and persuade to take your waste, you will have to pay for the privilege.

At Kyiv-based Ecological Laboratory, for example, you will pay about Hr 55 to recycle a computer tower and components, Hr 80 for a computer monitor and about Hr 50 for a laptop.

Some insiders say that many centers that accept broken computers allegedly for recycling just remove chips containing precious metals and throw away the rest into ordinary waste containers.

But Yuriy Nosychenko, head of Ecological Laboratory, said his company disassembles the computers and sends the toxic components to Dnipropetrovsk-based Dnipro VDM, a state-owned enterprise that is able to process them.

Ecological Laboratory even takes batteries provided you pay about 80-90 kopeks for each one. The enterprise stores them hoping to recycle when special equipment appears in Ukraine or to bury them when a special toxic waste-burial site is created.

Nosychenko said people never bring the batteries as “it is too expensive.” He also could remember only four or five cases when companies brought in batteries.

Andriy Bilokin, a Ukrainian representative of the World Wildlife Fund, called the requirement to pay for recycling toxic rubbish “nonsense.”
“When we deposit a bottle they pay us, but when we give bulbs we need to pay for that,” he said.

The new recently adopted tax code contains a so-called “ecological tax” ordering companies to pay for processing rubbish they produce and even store.
Boreiko, the ecologist, believes this tax is a good solution as it will allow state “to create new firms for waste processing.”

But Nosychenko from Ecological Laboratory doubts the “ecological money” will be directly sent for recycling needs and suggests instead including the costs for processing into the price of electronic goods.

“You buy a monitor, use it for two or three years, and then give it back [for recycling], receiving instead 10 percent of its collateral price,” Nosychenko said. He added that this practice would encourage people to bring toxic rubbish for processing.

He said he had tried to arrange the placing of the special boxes to collect batteries in big electronic supermarkets, but the idea wasn’t supported by the management of the shops.

Bilokin of World Wildlife Fund agreed that paying for recycling while buying of the product is a common practice in Europe and would be the only way to solve this problem in Ukraine.

The Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine said they are aware of the issue and are currently researching the foreign technologies for recycling of the electric batteries and other toxic waste.

Oleksandr Posmitnyi, deputy head of ecological safety department of the ministry, told the Kyiv Post that Ukraine was aiming to attract foreign investors for construction of “workshops for processing of batteries, bulbs and electronic equipment”.

“Until the end of 2012 we must solve this problem,” he added.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]