Spores: business urged the Cabinet of Ministers to accelerate the start of the waste recycling reform

08.09.2021
Spores: business urged the Cabinet of Ministers to accelerate the start of the waste recycling reform

What prevents the launch of the concept of extended producer responsibility in Russia.

Business has asked the government to speed up waste management reform. Three associations - Klever recycling companies, StekloSoyuz glass container plants and the League of Waste Paper Recyclers - appealed to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin (Izvestia has the documents) with a request to launch the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) concept as early as 2022. ... Since 2015, raw materials that have not been returned to circulation have accumulated in landfills for 275 billion rubles, the implementation will allow these funds to be returned to the economy, according to the utilizers. The Ministry of Natural Resources will put the launch of the reform from 2022 on. The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade previously proposed to postpone its start by two years - until 2024. Big business has continued to oppose reform since 2022.

Call to action

At the end of August, the Klever Association of Recyclers, Glass Container Plants StekloSoyuz and the League of Waste Paper Recyclers sent letters to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin asking him to start implementing the ROP concept from 2022. The reform implies that producers must recycle goods and their packaging themselves or pay eco-fee for this.

The Klever Association noted that in addition to the environmental damage to the environment, waste disposal instead of complete recycling causes economic damage to the interests of the state, since the cost of valuable secondary raw materials not returned to economic circulation is at least 275 billion rubles. We are talking about waste that has not been recycled (recycled) and buried at landfills since 2015.

The letter of the association says that the draft law on the implementation of the EPR concept is generally positively assessed by the industry community, but its adoption is represented by associations representing the interests and importers of goods and packaging. This position “stems from disinterest in imposing additional financial and administrative burdens,” the authors suggested.

“Can such a counterposition of economic interests to the interests of the state and society be admissible,” the document says.

The postponement of the concept for the implementation of the EPR may lead to several billion rubles of lost profits for the glass container factories in the country, the head of the StekloSoyuz association Viktor Osipov told Izvestia. Due to the lack of a system for collecting cullet, glassmaking plants use 80% of refractory materials, which affects the life cycle of furnaces, and companies are forced to update equipment more often, he explained.

As Izvestia wrote, the updated ROP concept was approved on December 28, 2020. According to the document, by the beginning of 2022, 100% recycling of packaging should be introduced in the Russian Federation, the regulatory disposal of goods (or payment of eco-tax) for companies will increase by 10% per year. However, the concept is not a legal act.

Four-year stagnation

The office of Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko noted that for more than four years of operation, the state enterprise in its current form has demonstrated complete environmental and economic stagnation.

- In the country, garbage processing capacities have not appeared en masse, the population actually fully pays for garbage disposal, enterprises are not interested in using more environmentally friendly materials. Business pays about 3 billion rubles for environmental fees, and citizens - about 190 billion rubles for garbage collection and disposal, - a representative of Victoria Abramchenko told Izvestia.

After a long study and detailed discussion, at the end of 2020, a new EPR concept was approved, new rules were determined that will allow achieving a complete balance between the packaging released into circulation and its disposal. This will create the necessary impetus to eliminate the generated waste and reduce the financial burden on citizens, added the deputy prime minister's office.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin set a goal to reduce garbage collection by 50% by 2030, while all of them must be sorted by 100%. The EPR concept is aimed at implementing this task and should start working from 2022, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources.

- We support the desire of industries to increase the volume of sorting and recycling of waste. This is how a closed economy is formed in which everything has value, ”the department told Izvestia.

For example, glass is a material that, if properly sorted, can be recycled several times and become the raw material for new products. At the same time, the waste will not be sent to landfills, added to the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Over the past 10 years, recyclers of paper and cardboard waste have increased the recycling rate from 40% to 65%, recycling more than 4.4 million tons of waste paper annually, according to an open letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin from the Waste League Association. Paper converters ". The document says that if the correct EPR model is implemented, the overall recycling rate for paper and cardboard waste will rise to 90% in a few years.

Strengthen the administration

Now in Russia 1-3% of the total number of companies obliged to comply with the standards recycle waste on their own or pay for eco-assembly, since the administration system is not debugged, - Lyubov Melanevskaya, executive director of the Industrial Enterprise. This was reported to Izvestia in the environmental association (RusPEC).

"In these conditions, all the innovations proposed by the bill, including raising standards to 100% from 2022, double coefficient, excessive reporting, will completely fall on those companies that are already carrying out EPR, that is, on a small market share, which is unfair," the expert noted.

In her opinion, first of all, it is necessary to strengthen the management of the EPR so that the requirements are fulfilled by all subjects of regulation, and not only by those who do not shy away from their duties. The expert added that recently, business representatives made their proposals on how this can be done.

- On August 21, we, among 30 other manufacturers' associations, sent a letter to Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko, in which we proposed to clearly spell out the possibility of conducting EPR through associations, so that it would be easier for the regulator to control the business on the basis of the “one window” principle, as is customary in Europe, and to transparently determine the range of subjects of regulation, because in accordance with the bill, any manufacturers should bear responsibility for packaging, ”Lyubov said. Melanevskaya.

In Russia, a large amount of recyclable materials is actually accumulating at landfills, since the country does not have developed systems of industrial compost that make it possible to separate waste into different fractions, said a member of the expert council of the Federation Council committee on agrarian and food policy and environmental management, expert of the Moscow branch of Opora Russia Sergey Malikov. The expert believes that for the development of the waste recycling industry in the country, it is necessary to develop measures to support business, as well as create tools that ensure the transparency of the use of ecosuction funds for the development of appropriate infrastructure.

Risks 2022

Russia is not ready to implement the EPR concept since 2022, Uralkhim told Izvestia. They added that the country lacks the necessary legal framework, developed infrastructure and demand for secondary goods.

Alexei Vorobyov, director of corporate relations at Heineken in Russia, believes that today only increasing coefficients and fines are used as an "incentive" for the development of EPR. According to him, approximate calculations show that the costs of companies for the implementation of the concept should grow five or more times. Sooner or later, the costs are shifted to the cost of products on the shelf, a specialist told Izvestia.

The business has been preparing for EPR for a long time, she was given 10 years, noted in the Russian Environmental Operator (REO). The delay will do nothing for manufacturers: It is unlikely that companies will start using any other packaging this year or there will be any other significant changes, the organization added.

Earlier, the Ministry of Economy spoke in favor of postponing the reform of the RNP. The department published a conclusion according to which the planned start date of the reform from January 1, 2022 "seems unrealizable", and proposed to introduce a transitional period until 2024. As previously reported to Izvestia in the department, one of the main problems of the EPR institute is the administration system, which has not actually shown itself for six years, including difficulties in identifying and controlling EPR subjects and a low level of collection of environmental fees. In response to a new request, the Ministry of Economy stated that they did not question the need to improve the EPR system.

Source: https://iz.ru/

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