“Stop the environmental catastrophe in Lugovoya!” Photo courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.Moscow has no recycling system: all the city’s waste goes to landfill and the residents of its outlying areas are getting mightily fed up with the unsightly heaps and the stink they produce. The peak of the protests seemed to have passed in March, before Russia’s presidential election, but on 14 April, 4,000-8,000 people (figures vary according to the sources) turned out to protest in 10 towns around the capital. They called on the government to close down the overflowing landfill sites, abandon plans to build incinerator plants and introduce a recycling programme.
Russia’s prosperous capital is the place to be for those looking to make money and an enhanced lifestyle. The city is constantly growing upwards and outwards, and high rise estates are shooting up in previously rural areas. The downside, however, are the landfill sites that surround them. Nobody seems to have thought that people would live so far from the city centre. But that’s what has happened, and now people who managed to move from the regions and get a job and a mortgage in Moscow are asking themselves: what was it all for? To admire the view of the rubbish heaps from their windows?
“In Moscow, as long as people will buy a flat , there will be terrible housing going up,” a real estate expert once told me. “Even on a rubbish dump, if it’s cheaper.”
