European experience in environmental cleanup is ill at ease in Kyiv

The grim prospects dramatized by activists of the Ukraine’s Green Party, wearing gas masks to emphasize their message, seem to be confirmed by matchingly disheartening realities. The Water and Resources Service of the Ministry Ecological Resources reports fourteen cases of carbon dioxide registering six to nine times above normal, and twelve cases of this content surpassing the legally prescribed limit by six to thirteen times. Bearing in mind that this index is 4.5 times beyond the permissible limit in the densely industrially populated areas of Eastern Ukraine (compared to the average nationwide 3.5 increment), such statistics prove very alarming.

Ecology is a realm where Ukraine has signed practically all the relevant European instruments. True, a number of experts insist that Ukraine has potential enough only to plan and designate such targets, and that when it comes to implementation, the result is yet another crisis. This assumption seems corroborated by several ecological examples pertaining to the Ukrainian capital’s everyday life. At one time, many hopes were placed in the Kyiv City Council’s program on transport ecology. This program came down to (a) adjusting all available fuel to the Western standard and (b) transferring routes used by trucks and heavy-duty trailers outside the city limits.

Clause (a) caused a number of problems from the outset. First and foremost, the local gas-supplying companies objected because they knew they would be forced to trade in bottled gas. In addition, there would be the problem of installing storage facilities capable of catering to 500,000 cars officially registered with Kyiv authorities. Clause (b) offered several totally realistic options, including the clearing up of the downtown area and instituting tolls payable by all those driving their cars through Kyiv’s central streets. Clause (c) envisioned the construction of a number of cloverleaves. All three clauses are included in the capital’s renovation master plan, yet the deadlines remain undisclosed.

Incidentally, motor transport is regarded by ecologists as the most painful issue. In big cities, this amounts to 53% of urban pollution. Kyiv’s Public Health and Epidemiology Service reports 100 kilograms of harmful waste discharges per resident per year. Thus, formaldehyde content in the atmosphere over the capital’s thoroughfares, such as Chervnoarmiyska, Saksahansky Street, and Shevchenko Boulevard surpasses the permissible level by 92%; and dust count by 91% and 50%, respectively. The Ministry of Health says that city residents living in such polluted environs are 50% more susceptible to contagious diseases, 26% to malignancies, 70% to bronchial asthma, and 76% to blood-circulation ills.

It is generally known that the stated problem is by no means an inherently Ukrainian one. Germany, for example, set the task of lowering damage to the environment caused by motor transport. They have since shown positive results. The municipal authorities began by banning the use of gasoline with lead additives; from then on all motor vehicles had to conform to set harmful-discharge limits. Germany further succeeded in instituting uniform fuel output standards meeting accepted ecological requirements. At present, Germany is considering a ban on the use of sulfur as a fuel component.

Waste management is another important ecological aspect. Germany, once again, has succeeded in keeping its wastes from harming the populace, and most importantly, in making such wastes yield revenues. Naturally, the process implies meticulous sorting out and further recycling of such waste. Kyiv produces over 10,000 cubic meters of solid household waste every day, faced with epidemic outbursts in the vicinity of such dumps. Pyrohovo, a suburban settlement and a veteran dump of Kyiv, albeit currently no longer functioning officially, is a case study as local residents continue being afflicted [with environmental maladies]. Ecologists attribute the incidence to wastes undergoing decomposition, exposed to precipitations, and forming filtrates, thus accumulating infectious agents. An experiment involving residents of twenty Kyiv homes sorting out garbage had a sad outcome. After completing the project, the residents accustomed to the European rules of waste management found themselves faced with the familiar sight of huge ugly garbage heaps in lieu of colorful garbage cans left by tenants outside their homes to be picked up by garbage trucks.

True, problems such as these seem extremely minor compared to what the Western countries regard as major damage to the environment caused by industrial projects. In this particular case, Kyiv’s municipal authorities seem determined to take a radical stand; at least 35 environmentally hazardous businesses to be closed down before 2020, thus making 120 hectares of housing facilities available. Europe appears to have adopted a different strategy. Pollution is levied heavy fines, forcing their managers to take prompt steps to clean up. Some countries practice returning the money donated by environmentally harmful businesses to the local environmental relief foundation — naturally provided this business undertakes to reduce the amount of harmful discharges within a certain timeframe.

Kyiv hosted a European conference of world environment ministers this spring, discussing the possibility of instituting a Ukrainian waste management and pollutant transfer register. Domestic ecologists agreed that every business here had to be made legally responsible for recording its initial waste management data, specifying the amount and sorts of such discharges into the atmosphere, generating this data as a uniform database, and, most importantly, making this information generally accessible, so any citizen could access it and receive the kind of information he wanted.

So far a single step has been taken in that direction. The Ukrainian cabinet recently adopted a resolution presenting an official concept of curtailed harmful waste discharges into the atmosphere. Ecology and Natural Resources Minister Serhiy Poliakov told journalists that the official concept had been used to work out a special government program, although he knew better than mention any subsidies required for its implementation. Instead, he announced that “the main concept consists in reducing and limiting discharges containing sulfur, nitrogen, ammonia, light organic compounds and hard particles resulting from anthropogenic activities and capable of being carried over large distances.” As usual, the road appears to be paved with good intentions.