Ukraine is drowning in garbage – Bloomberg

In the country 95% of solid waste sent to landfills.

In recent years Ukraine has faced a new serious problem – the country is buried in its own waste. About it writes Bloomberg.

Total in Ukraine operates 36 thousand legal and illegal dumps, debris from which would be enough to cover evenly the whole territory of the occupied Crimea and war-torn Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

The publication notes that Ukraine has enough problems with the Pro-Russian militants in the Donbas and disappointment of investors in the economy, but now the former Soviet Republic still losing the fight against waste.

Authorities do not hasten to pay the bills, and the city slowly promoting the idea of recycling and are unable to invest the billions of dollars needed for the construction of incinerators and other modern facilities.

The article emphasizes that the risks are getting higher with every discarded plastic bottle, and international companies engaged in processing of garbage, miss the potential business.

“Almost all the landfills in Ukraine are being misused. On each of them at any moment something can happen”, – says the head of the energy and environment United Nations development Programme, Sergei Volkov.

According to the publication, Ukraine sends 95% of solid waste in landfills. For comparison, according to Eurostat, the solid waste in the EU make up 45%. Only 4% of all Ukrainian waste is sorted for recycling, compared with 39% in the EU.

Therefore, in Ukraine there is a growing risk of environmental disaster, such as the repetition of large-scale fire that broke out at the dump near the city in may 2016 and continued for several weeks.

At the same time, Ukrainians pay per month for garbage disposal the equivalent of only 26 to 37 cents, which is about $ 1 a month for a family of four. This is not enough to cover operational costs.

According to the European Bank for reconstruction and development, even given the fact that the Ukrainians one of the poorest Nations in Europe, fees for waste collection set by the state, much below the economically appropriate.

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