The government is preparing grounds for the elimination of toxic industrial zones

The White House Environmental Bloc has published three draft government decrees as part of a reform of the approach to objects of accumulated environmental damage – in other words, former industries that have turned into toxic dumps. Work with ownerless objects of this kind will be carried out by the state at the expense of environmental collection and will cost hundreds of billions of rubles, while government projects describe the procedure for examining, recognizing and eliminating objects of accumulated harm. The process will be controlled by municipalities, regions and Rosprirodnadzor together with Rospotrebnadzor – in total, according to the estimates of the Ministry of Natural Resources, we are talking about 3 thousand toxic industrial zones and facilities, and this figure is obviously not final.

The White House described the details of the future reclamation of abandoned toxic industries. The work, we recall, began with an environmental disaster in Usolye Sibirsky (see Kommersant dated March 4, 2021 and November 22, 2022) – based on the results of studying the topic in the environmental block of the government, it was divided into two blocks. The state will take care of the liquidation of ownerless toxic industrial dumps with the funds of the environmental tax from business, while the owners of operating facilities were forced to recultivate their industrial facilities after they are decommissioned – otherwise such enterprises will not be able to pay dividends or get rid of assets.

Abandoned production facilities for the deployment of the federal project “General Cleaning” should be recognized as objects of accumulated environmental damage (NVOS) – documents published on regulation.gov.ru and regulate the procedure for their fixation, examination and liquidation. “This is an attempt to tidy up the system for identifying and eliminating objects of NVOS and make it more specific. Until now, there were no rules for identifying objects of accumulated harm and survey rules,” says Irina Demina, CEO of ENV-consulting.

According to the estimates of the Ministry of Natural Resources, more than 3,000 such facilities have already been identified, and in the coming year alone, the budget will spend 20 billion rubles on the start of these works, and these figures are obviously not final – the liquidation of only the abandoned site of OAO Ufakhimprom in Bashkiria is estimated at the same amount, in the end we are talking about hundreds of billions, and sanctions restrictions on the supply of equipment, as previously reported by the Ministry of Natural Resources, can increase the total cost of the General Cleaning by another 30%.

The draft rules for identifying NVOS objects assume that municipalities, regional authorities or Rosprirodnadzor will continue to do this: within 30 days from the date of receipt of information about a potential object, its inventory should be made, including an assessment of the population in its zone of influence – these data will be sent to Rosprirodnadzor and Rospotrebnadzor, respectively. The draft rules for the inspection and assessment of objects of accumulated environmental damage, in turn, apply mainly to Rosprirodnadzor, which will give consent to these works to local and regional authorities (the service will be able to refuse to inspect objects of NVOS by “local” forces in difficult cases – for example, in relation to enterprises of the fuel and energy complex, metallurgy, petrochemistry, etc., landfills and toxic industries – probably for reasons of keeping them under federal environmental control). Rospotrebnadzor will receive data on the impact of NVOS objects on the life and health of citizens – according to them, the service will prepare conclusions on the level of such impact. The result of this inventory should be a conclusion about the object of accumulated harm and a decision on its inclusion in the state register.

Finally, according to the draft rules for organizing the elimination of accumulated harm for objects from the register, projects will be developed that will become the subject of state contracts under 44-FZ – it will be mandatory for them to use the best available or cost-effective technologies that do not exceed the standards of permissible environmental impact. Harm elimination projects will be required to undergo a state environmental review, as well as verification of the reliability of determining the estimated cost – Rosprirodnadzor or one of its FGBUs will be responsible for this. Also, Rosprirodnadzor will carry out indefinite “monitoring” of the liquidation process and seek compliance with all requirements from customers. This process should end with the approval of the opinion service on the completion of the elimination of accumulated harm – without it, it will be impossible to remove the NVOS object from the registry.

It should be noted that Rosprirodnadzor takes over the function of checking the estimate documentation by analogy with the control of estimates of measures to prevent and eliminate environmental pollution as a result of the operation of especially hazardous facilities. The documents “increase the influence of Rosprirodnadzor on the organization of the elimination of accumulated harm, this is the correct norm, Svetlana Radionova (head of the service.— “b”) at the beginning of this year sent a letter to the constituent entities of the Russian Federation about massive deviations from projects and about the performance of work not in full during liquidation,” says Irina Demina.

“Documents are just a step towards the huge work to eliminate the accumulated harm, which should begin with identification, ranking by hazard classes, creating a register and so on. It should be an open and flexible information system. Unfortunately, it has not yet been possible to create such examples in the field of environmental protection. The main thing here is a working efficient mechanism, which we have no analogues in this area,” concludes Boris Morgunov, head of the HSE Institute of Ecology.

Oleg Sapozhkov, Artem Chugunov