In two villages of Transcarpathia, they introduced innovations in plastic waste management (PHOTOS)

At the end of the year, there was a press tour of the Uzhgorod Press Club  with representatives of the NGO "Ecosphere" to the villages of Verkhni Vorota and Abranka in Volovets district, which became the first villages of Transcarpathia, where presses for plastic (plastic bottles, glass, etc.) were installed.  Journalists were able to see how effectively the system of selective collection of waste is being implemented in the mountain villages and what measures are implemented in the entire region.  

   Since the summer of 2013, in the villages of Nyznhi Vorota and Abranka in Volovets district, the system of selective waste collection has been implemented. Here, they put 20 containers for the collection of glass and plastic, first of all PET bottles. A 2 cubic meters container accommodates about 200 kg of glass and 12-15 kg of plastic. Every two weeks, procurement firms take the collected recyclables from the containersort. During the program, 180-200 cubic meters of plastic and 75-85 cubic meters of glass was removed from the villages, or in terms of weight – about 2 tons of plastic and about 23 tons of glass.

But in these villages, they not only actively started to sort garbage, they approached the problem comprehensively: for every village, they bought a special hydraulic press, which will reduce the volume of the collected plastic waste almost 15 times!

The implementation of selective collection of solid waste, especially in the mountain villages of the Carpathian region of Ukraine, is the best strategy for waste management. Because of the mountainous terrain, well-developed network of streams and mountain rivers, as well as a significant number of the territories included in the objects of nature conservation, the arrangement of their own landfills is virtually impossible. The more recyclables is sorted of the total volume of solid waste, the less amount of it needs to be transported for disposal. Meanwhile, local governments will be replenished with funds received from the sale of collected recyclables