The Environment : Cost Concerns Get Russia Recycling : Though the motive is more financial than ecological, Muscovites are reusing discards such as paper, scrap metal.

MOSCOW — Eco-marketing means little to Mikhail Ostreyov. A veteran Soviet papermaker, Ostreyov suspects that pushing a product as “environmentally friendly” isn’t the way to make money in the Russian market, where price is everything and ecological correctness counts for little.

But he does believe that recycled paper may be profitable in Russia simply because it is cheaper to produce. Old paper, he says, sells for half the price of raw papermaking materials.

His new papermaking company, Khimlesprom, recently began experimenting with Russia’s first office paper recycling project. The idea came from Ecologia, an East European-American nonprofit group.

Ecologia sponsored a study showing that such a project could make money in Moscow. When Oleg Cherp, Ecologia’s program director in the former Soviet Union, approached Ostreyov with the idea, the papermaker wasn’t convinced. But now he is willing to give it a try.

“If you look at the money we earn from different types of work we do, then currently recycling brings in very little,” Ostreyov said. “But I feel that in the near future it will make economic sense.”

Ostreyov’s rule of thumb is a reliable guide for the small but growing number of environmental groups trying to promote recycling in Russia’s emerging market economy: If it won’t turn a profit or at least pay for itself, don’t even think about it.

Although the Soviet Union was one of the world’s worst eco-offenders, it had a system for recycling and reusing the few consumer goods it produced. In some years, one could not get a full vodka bottle without turning in an empty one.

Beverage bottles were washed and reused, comrades exchanged used paper for coupons with which they could get hard-to-find books. Communist Young Pioneers collected scrap metal to make train cars.

With the market economy came an onslaught of imported goods packaged in plastics, laminated paper, aluminum cans and glass bottles in Western shapes and sizes that cannot be reprocessed here.

Meanwhile, environmentalists say, the old collection system broke down, and the old rewards don’t interest people anymore. There is no shortage of books now, and the Young Pioneers have disbanded.

As a result, Russia today is awash in garbage. Moscow alone will produce about 18 million tons of domestic waste this year, according to the capital’s regional waste management department. Almost all of that garbage just gets dumped--along streets and in empty lots as well as in municipal dumps outside the city.

If office paper recycling proves profitable, at least some of the new garbage will not wind up in the dumps. Cherp sees the venture as a way to close the recycling loop--a challenge met neither by the Soviets nor by many Westerners.

“An environmentalist probably wouldn’t call (the Soviet system) recycling, because they didn’t produce paper from paper. They produced cardboard and some building materials and very low-quality wrapping paper,” he said. “They didn’t have the facilities to do good-quality paper from recycled paper.”

Khimlesprom is one of the few companies in the former Soviet Union that can produce high-quality paper from post-consumer scrap. Ostreyov says he can recycle office paper up to seven times, and oversaw a test run for Ecologia at a factory north of Moscow.

But the project is still in the experimental stage. Cherp found a commercial hauler to collect and store scrap paper, contract out the recycling into office paper and sell it back to organizations recruited by Ecologia. So far, more than 1 1/2 tons of waste have been collected.

If enough offices buy the recycled paper in bulk, the project will become commercially viable and Ecologia will pull out, leaving office paper recycling to expand or contract with the market..

The paper donors so far are Russian environmental organizations and Western offices, including the U.S. Embassy. Ecologia started with organizations already in the habit of sorting and whose employees may welcome environmentally friendly products.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, Russian businessmen copy a lot of things from the West, and they try to have a very good image among Western partners,” Cherp says. “So I think they would copy this attitude to recycled products.”

But the whims of the market often interfere. This fall, for example, Khimlesprom interrupted the recycling project for a more profitable one--producing paper for textbooks for the new school year.

Other new, small-scale recycling projects in Russia are finding that the economics of recycling are as important as the ecology.

Students in a village in Bashkortostan, in the Urals, wanted to collect glass and paper to keep them from ending up in dumps in their streets and a nearby swamp. But local authorities couldn’t help pay to haul the stuff to a processing plant a few hours’ drive away.

“They say they have too many other things to do,” said Marina Laskina, a former teacher there.

Laskina got a start-up grant from the Institute of Soviet-American Relations, a U.S. nonprofit organization, and many of the village families agreed to pay 3,000 rubles (just under a dollar) per person per year for pickups that started in late November.

But that money in addition to what the plant pays for the glass and paper is not enough to cover the students’ transport costs, and Laskina acknowledges that the project may be in trouble when the grant money runs out.

In Kazan, an industrial city on the upper Volga, a recycling club of youths known as “Ants” has solved the economic question by picking up scrap metal, which is valuable and plentiful in Russia. The club can easily make $1,000 per week selling it to factories.

“People are throwing money on the street,” said club leader Alexander Dorofeyev. “It used to be all communal property. But now they’re beginning to realize they can’t just toss it out.”

Dorofeyev has secured contracts with two large factories that want all the metal the Ants can collect. He doesn’t reap the profits. They are used to maintain the club’s truck, finance environmental expeditions and pay the kids who gather the scrap.

About half a dozen adolescents collect scrap each day in the winter, quadruple that number in the summer, says Dorofeyev, who organized the club to keep the streets clean not only of trash but of idle kids.

“We have a strong mafia in Kazan,” he said. “This gives structure to 12- or 14-year-old kids with alcoholic fathers, or no fathers.”

Recycling projects that do not break even won’t fly in Russia--including some that might be workable in a less confusing economy.

When environmentalists with Earth Day Russia learned that the country had no technology to recycle aluminum cans, they tried to send them back to Western Europe where they came from. But export tariffs on metals made it too expensive.

Aluminum cans are one of the most abundant pieces of trash in the new Russia. Once so unusual that they were displayed in Russian living rooms as decoration, beer and pop cans now litter city streets.

While few local or regional governments in Russia have any money to start recycling projects, some remain from the Soviet system.

The Experimental Factory of Mechanized Household Waste in St. Petersburg, which turns about 900,000 cubic meters of garbage per year into compost, is the only state-sponsored facility of its kind in the country. The compost is sold to farms, but sales don’t nearly cover costs.

Some environmentally sound habits survive from the Soviet era too. One is the tradition of bringing your own bag to the market. Sturdy plastic bags cost 10 to 15 cents in most shops, although they are free at a few Western-style supermarkets.

Most Russians wash and reuse their plastic bags until they are full of holes.

Although Soviet-built bottle-washing sites cannot handle imports, people can still get a few rubles for turning in Russian-made beer, vodka or wine bottles.

Many of Russia’s new poor spend their days at garbage dumps, scavenging for these treasures.

More on Ecology

While Moscow battles economic chaos, environmental woes ravage the provinces. Public health is in jeopardy, and children pay a grim price. Reprints of “Ecological Russian Roulette” are available from Times on Demand. Call 808-8463, press *8630 and select option 1. Order item No. 6029. $1.95.