Cleaning autumn leaves from the Moscow lawns remains a cause for dispute between the authorities and environmental activists who insist that the removal of fallen leaves is harmful to plants. The need for such cleaning city hall I tried to imagine how the requirement of inhabitants, implemented through the “Active citizen”, but a vote on this issue is no longer held. However, the leaves are taken actively, hiding their origin in contracts and spending hundreds of millions of rubles. This writes the correspondent of “Medusa” Ivan Golunov.
For several years the city of Moscow conducted a survey of Muscovites in the “Active citizen”, offering to maintain the existing order of cleaning the fallen leaves in your yard or change it. A vote about the procedure of harvesting the leaves in the yards was one of the first surveys of the project, but interest in it is constantly decreasing. If in 2015, a year after the launch of the Active citizen, in the vote was attended by more than 326 thousand Muscovites, in 2018, a question answered only 182 of thousands of users of the project.
As found “Medusa” during the four years of voting in any court of the order of harvesting the leaves change failed with a vote on Active citizen. In a press-service “Active citizen” confirmed this fact, noting that more vote on this issue is not carried out.
Rules fall harvest leaves were approved in 2002: according to these rules leaves the utility should clean up within a radius of 25 meters from roads, 10 meters from the streets and five meters from domestic driveways and paths. Officials claim that the fallen leaves pose a threat to the safety of the citizens, as the leaves can clog the gutters, and in bad weather it is possible to slip and get injured.
However, in practice, leaves are often collected from around the yard, and not only in the approved radius. This has led to conflicts between caretakers and residents of the courtyards, the most active of which is even called on to cut the bags with collected leaves and scatter them back on the lawns. The Department of natural resources and environmental protection was supported by citizens in disputes about cleaning the leaves, was urged to write complaints about violations when cleaning leaves and public utilities threatened with fines for illegal harvesting. However, the “jellyfish” could not know whether to pay at least one district enterprise GBU “zhilischnik” such a penalty.
Every autumn for the collection and disposal of fallen leaves the mayor’s office spends hundreds of millions of rubles. According to the estimates of “Medusa”, in the autumn of 2019, the officials sent to this task more than 850 million. This figure of “Medusa” have analyzed all the tenders for removal of garbage GBU “zhilischnik” all municipal districts of the capital. In most councils, the officials do not indicate directly that the procurement concerns the removal of leaves, using various euphemisms. For example, zhilischnik in the South-Western district of the capital announced a tender for “removal of waste resulting from cleaning of yard territories”, with a performance period of September-October. Yet the North-West district places the contracts for “the removal and disposal of casual trash”. According to the procurement plan, random garbage in this County is formed only in the autumn.
GBU “highways of the southern district” placed a contract for the “removal of waste generated during the cleaning of objects of road economy in the period from 15 September to 1 December”. In the Southeast the foliage prefer to call “plant waste”, clarifying in the contract that we are talking about the “fallen leaves collected in the period of mass falling leaves.” Only in the Western district of the capital directly order services for the export estimates and leaves from the area.
Differ the volume of export of leaf litter from the area. For example, “zhilishchnik Solntsevo” in the fall of 2019 spent seven million on the export 8960 cubic meters of “crop residue” that is approximately 2.6 thousand tons of foliage. And comparable in terms of population district Kuz’minki for the autumn we collected a total of 2784 cubic meter of foliage (835 tons). Spending on the cleaning of foliage in areas of the Western district, almost 150,5 million rubles, and less foliage is produced in the neighbouring South-West – where her cleaning this fall, has spent a total of 35.8 million roubles.
Under the terms of the contracts, found “Medusa”, the collected leaves are Packed in black plastic bags and taken to landfills. But in most cases it is not clear which polygon go sheets. Only a few contracts utilities Eastern district of Moscow is stated that waste should be disposed of at the landfill in the Ryazan region, located 180 kilometers from Moscow. These parameters correspond to only one landfill in Rybnovsky district of Ryazan region. In the summer of 2019, local residents discovered that the landfill come the garbage trucks with Moscow numbers. In the departments of natural resources and public utilities, which is subordinated to the GBU “zhilischnik”, not comment on the situation.
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