Capital's Rubbish Mounting

SThe Moscow regional government, alarmed by the prospect that mounting waste heaps will cover 50,000 hectares around the capital by the year 2000, wants to build 12 giant waste incinerators but lacks the cash to pay for them.Olga Budarina, spokeswoman for the Moscow regional government, confirmed a report in Moskovsky Komsomolets that the Moscow region produces 20 million tons of waste annually, of which 14 million tons comes from the capital itself. Unless the 12 incinerators are built, eight of them by 1998, the waste dumps will cover 50,000 hectares in the region, the newspaper cited government experts as saying. Yury Melukumov, deputy regional minister in charge of land, said the regional government had preliminary plans for 12 incinerators that would process up to 15 percent of the waste. But he said the region produces as much as 50 million tons annually.According to Melukumov, the city produces most of the waste but can no longer use nearby dumps, which are all but full. Transporting waste to dumps further from the center is so expensive that it is cheaper to build waste incinerators near the city, he said.Melukumov said that the region was hoping to get the city to pay for much of the construction of the incinerators, but city officials said funding was not available and called the regional waste data much exaggerated. "That's a fantasy," said Leonid Fyodorov, the general director of Ekotechprom, the city department in charge of waste management in the city of Moscow, in response to the regional government plan. "There is no money." Fyodorov said the region was simply trying to convince the city to pay more attention to the waste problem by using inflated waste production data.Galina Grossman, spokeswoman for Ekotekhprom, said the city produced only 11 million tons of waste annually, much of which cannot be incinerated.Mocow city has only two waste incinerators and found additional funds for just one new plant, which is under construction and should be functional in 1997, Fyodorov said. It will incinerate 250,000 tons per year, he added.Ecological groups including Greenpeace have in the past protested against plans for the construction of waste incinerators because such plants often release heavily toxic chloro-dioxines. In some countries chloro-dioxines have been found in the milk of cows grazing near incinerators.