Raw materials: business urged the Cabinet of Ministers to speed up the start of the waste management 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 factories and the Waste Paper Recyclers League — turned to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin (Izvestia has the documents) with a request to launch the implementation of the extended producer responsibility (EPR) concept as early as 2022 . Since 2015, raw materials worth 275 billion rubles have accumulated in landfills, and the implementation of the concept will allow these funds to be returned to the economy, according to recyclers. The Ministry of Natural Resources supports the launch of the reform from 2022. The Ministry of Economic Development had previously proposed to postpone its launch by two years, until 2024. Big business is still opposed to the reform from 2022.

call to action

At the end of August, the associations of disposers Klever, glass container factories StekloSoyuz, and processors League of Waste Paper Recyclers sent letters to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin with a request to launch the implementation of the ERP concept from 2022. The reform assumes that manufacturers will have to dispose of goods and their packaging themselves or pay an eco-fee for this.

The Klever Association noted that in addition to environmental harm, the growth in waste disposal instead of their complete processing 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 disposed of (recycled) and buried in landfills since 2015.

The association's letter says that the draft law on the implementation of the EPR concept is generally positively assessed by the industry community, but associations representing the interests of manufacturers and importers of goods and packaging oppose its adoption. This position is "due to disinterest in imposing additional financial and administrative burdens on them," the authors suggested.

“Such a opposition of one's own economic interests to the interests of the state and society can hardly be considered acceptable,” the document states.

The postponement of the implementation of the ROP concept could lead to several billion rubles of lost profits for the country's glass container plants, Viktor Osipov, head of the StekloSoyuz association, told Izvestia. Due to the lack of a collection system for cullet, glass factories use 80% refractory materials, which negatively affects the life cycle of furnaces, and companies are forced to upgrade 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, and the standard for recycling goods (or paying eco-fee) for companies will increase by 10% per year. However, the concept is not a normative legal act.

Four-year stagnation

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

- The country has not massively appeared capacities for waste processing, the population actually fully pays for waste disposal, enterprises are not interested in using more environmentally friendly materials. Business pays about 3 billion rubles in eco-collection, and citizens pay about 190 billion rubles for the removal and disposal of waste,” a representative of Victoria Abramchenko told Izvestia.

After a long study and detailed discussion at the end of 2020, the new EPR concept was approved, new rules were defined that will achieve a full balance between the packaging put into circulation and its disposal. This will create the necessary impetus for the elimination of generated waste and will reduce the financial burden on citizens, the Deputy Prime Minister's office added.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin set the goal of reducing waste disposal by 50% by 2030, while all of them must be sorted by 100%. The ROP concept is aimed at the implementation of this task, and it should start working from 2022, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources.

— We support the desire of industries to increase the volume of waste sorting and recycling. This is how a circular economy is being 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 a raw material for new products. At the same time, waste will not be sent to landfills, the Ministry of Natural Resources added.

Over the past 10 years, paper and cardboard waste recyclers have increased their recycling rate from 40% to 65%, recycling over 4.4 million tons of waste paper annually, according to an open letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin from the League of Waste Paper Recyclers association. If the correct EPR model is implemented, the overall level of cycling of paper and cardboard waste will increase to 90% in a few years, the document notes.

Strengthen administration

Now in Russia they independently dispose of waste or pay an environmental fee of 1-3% of the total number of companies obliged to comply with the standards, since the administration system has not been debugged, Lyubov Melanevskaya, executive director of the Industry for the Ecology Association (RusPEC), told Izvestia.

“Under these conditions, all the innovations proposed by the bill, including raising the standards to 100% from 2022, a double coefficient, excessive reporting, will fall entirely on those companies that are already implementing the ROP, that is, on a small market share, which is unfair,” the expert noted.

In her opinion, it is first necessary to strengthen the administration of the RBA so that the requirements are met by all subjects of regulation, and not just those who have not shied away from their duties anyway. The expert added that business representatives have recently made proposals on how this can be done.

— On August 21, we, along with 30 other associations of manufacturers, sent a letter to Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko, in which we proposed to clearly state the possibility of executing the RPR through associations, so that it would be easier for the regulator to control the business on the “one-stop shop” principle, as is the case in Europe, and also to transparently define the circle of subjects of regulation, because in accordance with the draft law, any manufacturers should bear responsibility for packaging,” said Lyubov Melanevskaya.

In Russia, a large amount of recyclables really accumulate at landfills, since industrial compost systems that allow separating waste into different fractions are not developed in the country, said a member of the expert council of the Federation Council committee on agrarian and food policy and environmental management, an expert of the Moscow branch of Opora Rossii Sergey Malikov. The expert believes that for the development of the waste processing industry in the country, it is necessary to develop support measures for businesses, as well as create tools to ensure transparency in the use of eco-collection funds for the development of the relevant infrastructure.

Risks-2022

Russia is not ready to implement the EPR concept from 2022, Uralchem told Izvestia. The country lacks the necessary legal framework, infrastructure and demand for secondary goods are underdeveloped, they added.

Aleksey Vorobyov, director of corporate relations at Heineken in Russia, believes that today only multiplying coefficients and penalties are used as a “stimulus” for the development of ROP. According to him, approximate calculations show that the costs of companies to implement the concept should increase five times or more. Sooner or later, the costs will be transferred to the cost of products on the shelf, the specialist told Izvestia.

Business has long been preparing for the ROP, 10 years have been given for this, the Russian Environmental Operator (REO) noted. The delay will do nothing for manufacturers: it is unlikely that companies will start using some other packaging this year or any other meaningful changes will occur, the organization added.

Earlier, the Ministry of Economics supported the postponement of the ROP reform. The agency published a conclusion according to which the planned start date for the reform from January 1, 2022 “seems unrealizable”, and proposed a transitional period until 2024. As previously reported to Izvestia in the department, one of the main problems of the ROP institute is the administration system that has not actually shown itself in six years, including the difficulties of identifying and controlling subjects of the ROP and the low collection rate of eco-fee. In response to a new request, the Ministry of Economy said that they did not question the need to improve the ROP system.

Source: https://iz.ru/

Reference:

The position of "StekloSouz" initially was that the ROP lies with the manufacturers of products. Glass container factories are cullet utilizers, they are entitled with this status to support and funding from the Russian Ecological Fund.

The Ecology Committee of the Association "StekloSouz" of Russia did a great job of preparing proposals for the successful implementation of the Concept of Extended Responsibility of Producers and Importers of Goods and Packaging (ERP) and the Roadmap approved by Abramchenko V.V. Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.

All proposals were sent to the Government of the Russian Federation, the Russian Environmental Operator (PPK REO) and other structures.