The list of goods for recycling will be expanded

They want to make toys, air filters, furniture, sleepers and other goods mandatory for recycling. A draft government decree with an amended list is posted for public discussion.

New positions in the list are goods whose analogues are already mandatory for disposal, made of a homogeneous material suitable for processing, containing hazardous substances or the decomposition of which takes too long, the Ministry of Natural Resources explained.

The inclusion of a product in this list (it already includes thousands of items) obliges the manufacturer (or importer) to ensure their disposal under the extended producer responsibility (EPR). The modernization bill is likely to be passed this year and go into effect next January. Companies can recycle their products on their own, entrust this to contractors, or pay the state an environmental fee. Due to these funds, the waste management industry will be improved and operated. All used packaging and partially the goods themselves are subject to recycling, each type of product has its own standard.

Last year, household payments for garbage collection amounted to 190 billion rubles, and ROP fees amounted to about 4 billion rubles. The EPR mechanism should correct this imbalance and flood the waste management industry with investment. “After processing these wastes, we will get paper pulp, wood chips, metal scrap, polymer agglomerate and other materials,” Denis Butsaev, head of the PIC REO, lists. “Prices for recyclables, like demand, are very volatile, so it is impossible to accurately calculate the economic effect of such an expansion of the list.”

For the development of processing, it is necessary to build and modernize the infrastructure, and for this, the ROP money must come to the industry, adds the chairman of the Russian Ecological Society, Rashid Ismailov. The current 4 billion is not enough for this.

Additional needs for waste processing capacity are 19 million tons per year, Butsaev added. If they are not put into operation, it will not work to recycle everything that is needed. Now, out of 60 million tons of household waste, 43.3% gets to the sorting lines, and only 11% (not counting organics) gets to processing from the selected recyclables (not counting organics), recalled in the PIC REO.

Meanwhile, recycling professionals have significant comments to the list.

“For our part, the list included paper towels, napkins - almost all types of sanitary and hygienic products, except perhaps toilet paper, and they can’t be recycled in principle,” Aleksey Sergeev, executive director of the League of Waste Paper Recyclers Association, shared with RG. . “Or, for example, it is proposed to supplement the list with electrically insulating impregnating paper, but it is not included in municipal solid waste at all, it lasts for years and it cannot be perceived in the same way as packaging that becomes garbage at the time of unpacking the goods.”

Source: RG