About a year ago, the Swiss-Ukrainian project “Decentralisation Support in Ukraine” (DESPRO) launched an interesting initiative. DESPRO experts, in agreement with the Ministry of Ecology, started work on the creation of a regional waste management plan of the Vinnytsia Oblast. Why was this particular oblast chosen? DESPRO is connected with the Vinnytsia Oblast by many successful projects – primarily on rural water supply systems. In addition, DESPRO has been supporting an intermunicipal waste management project in the Tulchyn Rayon of the Vinnytsia Oblast since 2011.

Now, when work on this plan has already passed its conditional equator, a PR-support for innovations is needed. Therefore, DESPRO team has recently visited Vinnytsia, where, together with the Regional Development Agency, the main milestones of the forthcoming PR campaign were outlined. It is fairly limited in time, as in July this year the plan is expected to be submitted to the Vinnytsia Oblast Council for approval.

“We offer something very simple and understandable,” says Vyacheslav Sorokovskyi, DESPRO expert on decentralisation and public services. “Now the Vinnytsia Oblast is producing almost 350 thousand tons of waste of all types per year. Some part of it is buried at overloaded landfills, which usually operate in violation of environmental and sanitary norms. Everything else is precipitating on hundreds of spontaneous landfills that are found in almost every village. Waste contaminates the soil, diverse dangerous compounds, formed as a result of waste decay, are released into the air.

Some AHs introduced a separate collection of plastic, and also purchased garbage collection lines, reporting on the creation of additional jobs due to this. However, because of the reluctance of villagers to pay for waste removal, as well as because of incorrect calculations, many of these waste sorting lines are underloaded.

“There should not be such situations with budget funds use,” says Dmytro Laznenko, DESPRO expert on waste management. “In order to understand what capacities are needed for sorting and recycling garbage, one should look not at one hromada, but at a few dozen, that together can form a so-called waste management cluster. Within this cluster, you can maximally optimise all costs by synchronising logistics and technological solutions. According to our calculations, there should be 5-6 such clusters in the Vinnytsia Oblast.

Each cluster will have its waste management system and its landfill. And the place of this landfill inside the cluster must be determined jointly by all its hromadas. After that, all unauthorised dumps should be closed. Subsequently, including with the help of foreign investors, it is possible to create a whole processing infrastructure in each cluster.

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