Time to take out the garbage
How to combat the inactivity of housing departments
Spring is not just the season for romance. A lot of mundane problems must be resolved after the long winter. Among other things, the melting snow reveals piles of garbage that have to be removed on the double. All month long Kyiv will be tidying up its streets, but forest clearings and other spots are also among the city’s many dirty problems.
Today there are 50 unauthorized dumps in the city. Some of them are organized by local residents, while others result from mismanagement by housing departments known as ZhEks. One of The Day’s readers recently sent a letter complaining about the pile of garbage that has been accumulating in her yard for several months. The Day contacted the Kyiv City Administration’s Urban Planning Department.
Hennadiy Davydov, the department’s deputy head, told our reporter: “There is a standing control station where any resident of Kyiv can place a call about any problems in the city’s appearance, including garbage not picked up or broken apartment building doors. Unfortunately, not all Kyivans know that this station exists.”
The number to call is 289-7033. The dispatcher records all calls, and the shift inspector is informed about all the problems that have to be solved first thing during the morning staff meeting. An inspector visits a locale and decides on the spot whether the local ZhEk can deal with the situation or whether it should be solved by the district administration, hotel and municipal services department, or the local residential housing department. In any case, the Kyiv municipal administration assured The Day that the problem would be solved.
The main thing is to make a call and report a problem. The staff of the department, which receives about 17 calls a day, said that the 50 unauthorized dumps and the rest of the traditional spring garbage will be removed before the May celebrations.
At the request of our reporter, the garbage heap on Pryozerna St., as reported by our reader, has been entered on the work list. We trust the problem will be resolved soon. The local ZhEk, however, does not see any problem there. “Yes, there is a little pile,” the officials told us. “We’re trying to remove the garbage, as much as we can, as much as we can manage each time. We’ll remove more of it tomorrow. Why is the pile of garbage there? — because the dumpster broke down. And the tenants are dumping too much garbage. We keep removing it and they keep dumping it, household as well as industrial garbage.”
It is true that garbage is a relatively new problem in our society. “Before, if you wanted to buy a bottle of kefir, you had to have an empty bottle to buy it,” says Svitlana Berzina, head of the national ecological organization Living Planet. “We had few plastic bags at the time. A bag with a Coca-Cola logo was considered a windfall; people even took them to school.”
Spoiled paper sheets and scrap metal came in handy. There was generally much less waste. Now that we have an endless variety of packaging, every day the average family produces a sack of garbage, and the contents vary. Ukraine lacks the legal framework to solve this problem, and bureaucrats who are responsible for municipal services are not prepared to adjust to the new order.
Removing garbage from a yard means solving half the problem. Ukraine does not have a single garbage-processing facility. Last year a grant-funded experiment was carried out in a Kyiv district: local residents were given different colored bags for sorting their garbage. They did as they were told, but their bags were still collected by the same garbage truck.
