Talking Trash

For several months, there has been a steady trickle of news reports from Shiyes, a nondescript railway station nestled amid forests and lakes not far from Syktyvkar, that sound as if they are coming from a war zone. The people of the region’s cities and villages, including Arkhangelsk, have stood watch over a muddy construction site. Without asking anyone’s opinion, local authorities have allowed the area to be turned into a waste disposal site for Moscow, which lies 1,000 kilometers to the south.

Moscow has long neglected its waste problem. A growing city draining the rest of the country, the capital is a magnet for workers and students, building and expanding with no end in sight. Moreover, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has overseen massive redevelopment of the city’s streets, and plans to tear down hundreds of Soviet-era apartment buildings in order to erect larger and taller residential towers.

Yet the question nobody seems to have been asking is: “What do we do with all of our accumulating waste?”

«90% протестов в России сейчас – зеленые. Потому что в США, конечно, враги, и террористов вокруг навалом. Но вот свалка под окнами – это точно не Госдеп и не ИГИЛ, это своя собственная власть.»

“Ninety percent of protests in Russia now are green. Because of course there are enemies in the US and terrorists all over the place. But that dump outside your window is clearly not the work of the State Department or ISIS, that’s your own government.”
- Opposition Politician Dmitry Gudkov

In the past, unlucky towns in the Moscow region have hosted most of the city’s towering landfills, which have long since exceeded their capacity. People have started to take a stand against the endless lines of trucks and toxic fumes, that have begun to creep into the capital itself. To assuage the densely-populated region, the government decided to ship its refuse farther away.

Shiyes is just one such site, but the northerners living there are refusing to be steamrolled. Thousands have protested against it, and a dedicated crowd has set up a camp near the construction site, which actually lacks proper permits. Riot police and security guards, outfitted with automatic weapons, regularly clash with the protesters, and several have been arrested, while others have ended up in the hospital with severe injuries.

On social media groups devoted to the resistance, such as one named “Pomorye is Not a Dump,” members call for better sorting of garbage and recycling – options not readily available, especially in the Russian provinces. Ecologists, meanwhile, warn that the delicate northern landscape is no place for household waste: toxic discharge would pollute the swampy ground and seep into the groundwater and rivers.

The protest has brought the rift between Moscow and the rest of Russia into clear view: to some, the crisis shows that the Russian capital is a monstrous consumer that extracts resources from the rest of the country, then sends it garbage in return (recycling a meager 10 percent of its waste).

Resistance efforts like those undertaken in Shiyes are being discussed in other regions, though authorities clearly want to keep plans on the QT: in late May police confiscated the entire print run of the newspaper Tulskaya Pravda (100,000 copies), which was dedicated to waste disposal reforms and Tula Oblast’s agreement to allow Moscow to bury its waste in the region.

Years ago, environmental protests were not popular, and many Russians regarded them as gatherings of hippies and radicals. This has started to change, as more people are noticing developers encroaching on green spaces without offering any public good in return. In one Moscow neighborhood, a huge backlash recently halted plans for landscape improvements to a pond in a park: construction in green zones has become a politically sensitive issue.