Smolny explains financing difficulties for private eco-centers

On January 22, at a TASS press conference, representatives of the St. Petersburg government explained why the city enterprise «Nevsky Environmental Operator» receives funding, while private companies involved in waste collection and processing, including rare fractions, do not. As Vice Governor Alexei Korabelnikov noted, it is necessary to create a unified and economically justified system.

«Nevsky Environmental Operator» organizes sorting and selection of several types of secondary raw materials at waste processing plants:

• metal, tires, glass, cardboard;
• appliances, batteries, technogenic soil;
• raw materials for producing RDF-fuel.

Simultaneously, in the city, door-to-door separate collection is developing, which includes textiles, plastic with markings 1, 2, and 4, tin and aluminum cans, glass, and sometimes paper. The collection of hazardous waste is under the purview of the enterprise «Ekostroy».

At the same time, private projects that accept and process such fractions as plastic with other markings, bags, shaving machines, toothbrushes, plastic cards, Tetra Pak, caps, and medicine blisters have recently faced serious economic problems.

Head of the Committee for Environmental Management Kirill Soloveichik said: «We see volatility in prices for secondary material resources. We discussed it back in summer, thought about a separate program, subsidiary, for example, to support eco-centers. But our analysis showed that there are completely different organizational and legal forms. And it is important that by law and simply as a responsibility to the people, we must request a large volume of information [before supporting with money]. I have spoken several times with the owners, managers of eco-centers. For them, it is simply to some extent unbearable to fill out that volume of documentation for providing, in general, not very large support. We cannot give large grants.»

He noted that, in his opinion, the discussion should be about expanding the total number of eco-centers, building their interaction with processors and with large business players — for example, retail chains. It is known that earlier in St. Petersburg, an eco-center «Sbornka» was opened with the support of a large supermarket chain.

Vice Governor Alexei Korabelnikov emphasized: «In order to answer the question, to support or not to support, we first need to figure out how to correctly build the collection system so that it works in an economically justified way. We need to understand for each fraction how much the product produced from this or that fraction will be in demand on the market.»

Support can be not only direct monetary, but also in other forms — for example, in some cases in the form of limiting competition in the trade of the final product. Here, as an example, Korabelnikov cited rubber crumb: European suppliers, according to him, still offer cheaper goods than St. Petersburg ones, which makes life more difficult for the local processor.

«In order for this system to work, it is necessary that the waste we collect then actually goes somewhere, that it is in demand. We need to create and ensure the operation of this system from start to finish,» said Korabelnikov.

He also reminded of the situation with plastic collection containers from a private company that went bankrupt and could neither service nor remove them, which caused numerous complaints from citizens. St. Petersburg deputies pointed out that this contributed to the formation of a negative image of the «entire system» as a whole. The Committee for Environmental Management noted that NEO will consider the possibility of installing its own containers for collecting plastic instead of abandoned ones.