It takes guts to be eco-friendly in Ukraine. At schools, nobody teaches how to sort waste. At home, nobody talks about it. By the front doors of Ukraine’s apartment buildings, there are no sorting bins.
Ukraine recycles about 4% of its waste, but with such poor culture in this regard, even such modest results are a wonder. This wonder is the Ukrainian people, who read or saw somewhere that it was the right thing to do and started sorting garbage at home, amassing hoards of waste on their balconies and in larders before bringing it by public transport to sorting centers, which are usually run by volunteers.
An while the European Union countries recycle nearly 40% of their waste, Ukraine won’t be able to reach such volumes if only volunteers are involved. The EU states foster the recycling culture centrally, while the Ukrainian government doesn’t seem to care at all.
While the West promotes an eco-friendly lifestyle, trying to make it trendy and show how important it is for our planet, most of the waste in Ukraine, a country of 40 million people, ends up in one of 36,000 landfills, most of which are obsolete, illegal and extremely dangerous.
Poorly managed landfills contaminate soil and groundwater, while plastics that could be recycled break down into microplastic and end up dumped into the ocean, floating there for centuries and causing severe injuries and death to creatures that ingest debris or get entangled in waste.
The way to open up the recycling industry is, as nearly always in today’s capitalist culture, a financial incentive. In Ukraine, there should be a law that would introduce fees for recycling people’s waste and that would be included in utility bills. Once this is done, private and state companies will be ready to vie for the right to recycle waste and earn
this fee.
Ukraine needs a law on recycling to introduce the fees. But developing one hasn’t been on the list of priorities of the Ukrainian parliament, which has been busy with feuds between parties, the anti-corruption fight and the adoption of obvious, but important laws (like the one on lifting the moratorium on farmland sales). As a result, there’s not a single active recycling factory in the country and only about 80 private firms and nonprofits doing the job as best they can. That’s just ridiculous.
Without a central vision, those 4,000 sorting bins installed in Ukraine’s capital that officials like to boasts about look pathetic. Especially taking into account that most of them are a single bin for all recyclables and that people usually throw greasy pizza boxes and dirty milk cartons into them.
And that’s the capital. Meanwhile, in the regions, sorting and recycling are just unheard of.
