“The foresters told us straight away that they had been ordered to clear five hectares of forest for industrial development,” Nikolai Viktorov, a member of the Clean Urdoma public campaign tells me. “I talked to them. They were in shock at the very idea that such a large area of forest had to be cleared in a short time — every tree has to be marked for felling, after all. We then discovered the scale of the project: millions of cubic metres of domestic rubbish were due to be transported here for dumping. The builders were quite open about it, they told us that yes, there would be a landfill site and Moscow’s rubbish would end up here.” [...]
The Clean Urdoma campaigners believe that regional governor Igor Orlov has just handed his entire region over to the Russian government to be used as rubbish dumps. A dumping site outside Severodvinsk, in the north of the region, should be ready in 2019, and people in the Konosha district in the south of the region are worried that Moscow’s rubbish will also land on their doorsteps, over 700km away. [...]
The initiative group that is fighting the construction of a landfill site in Shiyes is calling for local residents to use only legal methods for opposing the project. Recently, activists have proposed running a local referendum on the issue of solid household waste being imported into the area from other regions, but the regional prosecutor’s office ruled this initiative unlawful.
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