Poltava faces a garbage collapse and an environmental disaster, but the local government does not go beyond meetings and round tables. The problem of recycling household waste for Poltava region has been acute for several years already. According to the Housing and Communal Services Department of the Poltava Regional State Administration, the annual volume of solid domestic waste (SDW) accumulation is 1.5 million cubic meters. By the beginning of 2017 in Poltava there were about 675 waste disposal sites, of which 640 authorized landfills, 8 solid waste landfills and 27 unauthorized landfills. For a year their quantity has not changed.
As early as 2016 it was reported that from January 1, 2018 there will be a ban on disposal of solid waste without recycling. Therefore, in Poltava have developed a comprehensive program for the management of solid domestic waste, which is planned to spend almost 842 million UAH.
The program provides for the creation of five subregions. The Poltava subregion will cover Poltava, Poltava, Novozhanzharskiy, Mashevsky, Karlovsky and Chutovsky districts. Kremenchug subregion – Kremenchug, Gorishni Plavni, Globinsky, Kozelshchinsky, Kobelyaksky and Kremenchug districts. Piryatinsky subregion – Piryatin, Piryatinsky, Chernukhinsky, Lokhvitsky, Lubensky, Orzhitsky, Grebenkovsky districts. Khorol subregion – Khorol, Khorol, Semenovsky, Velikobagachansky, Reshetilovsky, Shishatsky and Mirgorodsky districts. And the Gadyachsky subregion is Gadyach, Gadyachsky, Kotelevsky, Dikansky and Zenkovsky districts.
The program provides for the creation of 17 modern polygons in Poltava. They will be built, completed or reconstructed on the basis of existing ones, which will gradually be closed and recultivated.
“The landfill is a technical building that has a project, has a degree of protection that is provided for by all our laws and controls the impact on the environment.There is a service staff there, and in the future the operator of the landfill after reclamation should be responsible for the state of this burial for another 30 years” , – said the head of the Housing and Communal Services Department of the Poltava Regional State Administration Eduard Reva.
As of today, there are eight polygons in Poltava, which have documentation. But only two of them correspond to all state standards – in Kotelevsk and Novozhanzharskiy regions. As for the sorting of garbage before burial on landfills, in Poltava region they are just beginning to take the first steps in this direction. So, in Gadiacha, due to funding from the regional fund and the Gadyachsky City Council, for 3.5 million UAH purchased a mobile sorting line. Now this line is being assembled and ready for operation.
Reva promises that the regional government will help in every possible way those territorial communities that want to do this. Under the terms of the co-financing program 50/50 in 2017, 15 garbage trucks and 820 garbage containers of various sizes were already purchased. But if last year they gave money for equipment to everyone who wished, now the help will be directed to those local communities that already have certain developments in this area: sanitary scheme, logistics of garbage trucks movement, and so on. Otherwise, as noted in the Poltava Regional State Administration, the acquired equipment is “money to the wind.” In the same Gadyachsky district, with the support of the district state administration, all the villages concluded inter-municipal cooperation agreements. And the regional authorities helped to buy them two garbage trucks.

As for the separate collection of garbage, as required by the legislation of Ukraine from January 1, 2018, these issues should be resolved by local self-government bodies. But there is already a question to the culture of dealing with the garbage of the population itself. For, as the example of regions that have already installed containers for different types of waste proves, people are not very concerned about where to throw garbage. As a result, in the containers there is still a mix, that is, wastes of various types that have to be sent to the sorting line. At present, containers for separate waste collection in Poltava region were introduced in Mirgorod, Kremenchug and Karlovka.
With the construction of new landfills, the situation is best in Piryatinsky district. There he plans to equip in a former granite quarry, which is located near the motorway. The work has already begun. The process is also “moving” in this direction in Gorishniye Plavny, where a project has already been prepared that involves the processing of garbage and the production of RDF fuel. The cost of implementing this project is 250 million UAH. There are no such funds in the local budget, so now they are looking for an investor and are negotiating with a foreign bank about a loan.
The most critical issue with the landfill in Poltava, it is located a few kilometers from the regional center, near the village. Makukhovka. This place is taken Poltava garbage for more than 60 years. Even in the 1990s, it exhausted the resource and should have been closed. But over the years it has grown to an unprecedented size of 17 hectares and has come very close to the houses of the residents of Makukhovka.
Officials have not yet clearly defined the boundaries of the test range. Nearby is the Kolomak River, into which heavy metals flow down with rain streams, which then fall to Vorskla, Dnepr and then to the Black Sea. In addition, in the depth of a multimeter layer of debris, due to chemical processes, spontaneous combustion occurs periodically. Therefore, fires in the testing area are far from rare, and their elimination usually takes several days. Fortunately, so far without human sacrifice.
Residents of Makukhovka, Poltava region, have been demanding to close a flooded landfill for 20 years, and the deputies of the Poltava district council periodically threaten to take a decision to close the landfill in Makukhovka, which will lead to a garbage collapse in Poltava. An example, as it happens, recently showed the whole country Lviv.
Assistance in solving the problem was offered by the regional authorities and people’s deputies, but the final decision remains for the Poltava City Council. And here the most interesting begins. In words, the Mayor of Poltava, Alexander Mamai, stands for an early resolution of this issue. During the pre-election campaigns, he repeatedly promised to build a garbage processing plant in Poltava. Representatives of the city authorities even claimed that they had held talks with more than a dozen investors from Europe. But, it did not grow together … According to the opposition politicians of the mayor, the “unofficial” conditions of the Poltava officials proved to be prohibitive for European investors. Therefore, it did not go further than the meetings, round tables and protests of the residents of Makukhovka. In addition, around the city dump formed a kind of “business group”, the roots of which stretch to the top of the Poltava authorities. Directly in the dump there are several dozen people who directly at the landfill sorts garbage, take away metals, plastic, paper and put them in bigbags, which then are exported to collection points for recycling. Any attempts by the correspondent of Depo.Poltava to communicate with these people encountered manifestations of hostility.
Meanwhile, the search for a place for a new polygon of the Poltava subregion is accompanied by great difficulties. The choice of location is influenced, firstly, by two Poltava airports, which limit 15-kilometer zones. Secondly, Poltava has two rivers, near which groundwater is very close to the surface of the earth. A new place was found near the village of Markovka, ten kilometers from Poltava in the direction of Kharkov. These are forest fund lands, there is a sufficient distance to populated areas, and groundwater is located at a depth of more than ten meters. But in order to equip the training ground there, the authorities will have to withstand the considerable resistance of local residents, whom the future neighborhood with the dump, of course, does not please.
If the issue of solid domestic waste disposal is slow, but it is decided what to do with hazardous waste (batteries, mercury lamps, lighting, etc.), in Poltava no one knows. There is not a single enterprise in the region that would collect and process them. On January 25, on the website of electronic petitions to the Poltava City Council, a petition appeared with a demand to install containers for hazardous waste in Poltava. Within a few days, she collected the necessary 250 votes for further consideration by the Poltava authorities. But, again, the officials of the City Council remain silent. In the meantime, eco-activists independently collect hazardous waste around the city and “smuggle” them to the processing plants in Lviv.

So the situation with recycling of garbage in Poltava is far from unambiguous. Wherever local authorities have a desire to restore order in this area, there is every opportunity to achieve this. But not all heads of cities and regions realize the consequences of their inaction. They believe that a tragedy like the Lvov tragedy will bypass them. Responsible bodies would also probably help to ask officials about the results of their work to streamline the safe environment, but such enthusiasm was not noticed. Therefore, how and when the issue of cleaning the city and the region from waste will be resolved is not yet known.

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