Amid the Rubble of Communism, Moscow’s Trash Is Mounting

One whiff of the Khimky landfill makes it abundantly clear: Capitalism stinks.

To be fair, the dump was also smelly in Russia’s Communist days. But back then, comrades threw out mainly organic waste--potato peels, stray cabbage leaves and the like.

Now, such trash looks downright frumpy, as hopelessly retro as a bookcase filled with the collected works of V. I. Lenin.

The almighty consumer culture has arrived. And trendy young Russians have embraced it with glee.

The proof is in their trash: Sticky soda bottles still sloshing with Diet Pepsi. Greasy pizza boxes crusted with rancid cheese. Dirty diapers. Spoiled yogurt. Crumpled, sour beer cans. They all wind up at the dump, smashed into a towering pile with an odor only scavenger birds find sweet.

As ecological problems go, however, the stench is just a nuisance. Far more noxious is the sheer bulk of the rubbish.

Western packaging--plastic, aluminum, cardboard--now clogs Moscow’s three landfills. With no recycling programs and just one functioning incinerator, sanitation workers are struggling to cope.

“Ten years ago, no one paid much attention to trash,” said Galina Grossman, a spokeswoman for Ekotekhprom, the municipal sanitation company. “Now, people understand that cleanliness is very important. They don’t want their city to be built on heaps of garbage.”

Moscow produces about 2.5 million tons of nonindustrial waste a year. By the turn of the century, the city’s annual trash load is expected to weigh in at 3 million tons.

But those statistics do not begin to capture the problem. As Grossman points out, a ton of plastic bottles takes up much more space--and takes a lot longer to decompose--than a ton of carrot shavings. To make matters worse, Moscow has just one trash-compressor facility, which handles less than 3% of the city’s household waste. The rest of the crates, cans, bottles and boxes land in the dump intact. And there are plenty of them.

Just five years ago, Coke cans were so rare that youngsters collected them. A McDonald’s French fries carton was so precious it doubled as a desktop pen holder. And American labels had such cachet that Fanta bottles served as flower vases. No more.

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Jaded by a glut of products, Muscovites dismiss their onetime treasures as so much junk. Each of the city’s 9 million residents tosses out about 530 pounds of garbage a year--just a third of the U.S. average but far more than rural Russians without access to Western goods.

“It’s the ironic side to our reforms,” Oleg Cherp, a regional director for the international environmental group Ecologia, said with a sigh. “When it’s all mixed together in the dump, it really becomes a problem.”

The first problem is simply getting the trash to the Khimky landfill, about 35 miles outside Moscow’s city limits. Because so few of the cartons and cans get crushed, household waste is frustratingly bulky. Garbage trucks must make trip after trip to the landfill to handle daily routes.

Grossman estimates that her crews spend 75% of their time hauling garbage to the dump, leaving few hours for circulating through the city to pick up more.

Fed up with sloppy trash collection, Muscovites have taken to handling their waste themselves--by burning it. Many of the battered green dumpsters that sit outside apartment buildings bear scorch marks. City firefighters put out an average of 60 trash blazes a day. Many more fires probably go unnoticed, left to spew noxious smoke and potentially toxic chemicals into the air.

“Burning garbage like that is strictly forbidden,” Grossman said. “But it’s a big city, and maybe the inspectors don’t have time to keep an eye on every corner of it.”

As chief inspector, Public Works Director Ivan S. Ischenko said he is cracking down on illegal garbage fires.

He is also trying to punish ne’er-do-wells who let dumpsters overflow and vacant lots clog with litter.

It’s a tough job: New sources of trash keep popping up, from paper towels to greeting cards to that most capitalist of commodities, junk mail.

Confronted with the garbage explosion, sanitation workers have doubled the number of public trash cans in Moscow, to 40,000. But most of the receptacles still tend to be squat and small--throwbacks to the Communist era, when Russians strolling city streets had little to toss out except cigarette butts.

The old days were nearly trash-free because generic Soviet stores selling generic Soviet products rarely used packaging. A clerk lucky enough to have butter for sale would slice slabs for customers and hand them over, unwrapped.

Meat was also sold unpackaged. Shoppers had to bring their own bags for cookies, eggs, cottage cheese.

Even beer did not come in handy containers. Trucks that looked suspiciously like cement mixers drove up to a street corner and disgorged beer into plastic bags, glass jars or whatever else buyers held under the tap.

The country’s chronic shortages turned Russians into ace recyclers.

They washed and reused plastic bags. They converted newspaper scraps into toilet paper or linings for worn-out shoes. Glass milk bottles were redeemed for rubles. Old newspapers were swapped for an even better prize: hard-to-find books, which the state doled out as an incentive to recycle.

The only avid recyclers in Moscow these days are hard-luck scavengers such as Lyuda Kudryaseva, 34, who treks to the Khimky landfill twice a week to pick through the garbage.

“We’re not all beggars in this country--there are millionaires too, and they throw away some good things,” she explained, hefting a knapsack full of bottles she planned to redeem. Up the road a bit, Nikolai Smirnov, 66, trudged along, thrilled with his find--a sledful of wood scraps he could use to patch his home.

Despite daily intrusions by salvagers such as Kudryaseva and Smirnov, the Ekotekhprom officials who run the Khimky landfill insist that it is as hygienic as a dump can be.

“We do things in a very cultured, educated way here,” technical supervisor Anatoly Yudin said. “If all the dumps in Russia were like this, the country would be much better off.”

Yet by U.S. standards, even the showcase Khimky landfill is primitive. Only a layer of turf underneath the trash serves to prevent potentially toxic runoff from filtering into ground water. Modern landfills in the United States, in contrast, guard against contamination by lining each dump site with plastic and installing electronic monitors.

The Russian approach “is basically what the United States was doing in the 1920s,” said Kempton Dunn, a Moscow-based environmental analyst with Arthur D. Little, a consulting firm.

Newly aware of the potential hazards, Russians have taken to fighting landfills with the U.S. battle cry of NIMBY: Not In My Backyard.

Local activists recently rejected eight sites that Ekotekhprom engineers believed would make ideal new dumps.

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With existing landfills fast filling, Moscow is turning to alternative disposal plans. Several incinerators are under construction. Officials are also nudging along a prototype recycling program in Zelenograd, a Moscow suburb with about 400,000 residents.

To Dunn, both approaches seem foolish. Incinerators are too expensive and too risky, he said. And recycling is not cost-effective for Russia right now, when so many ecological disasters demand immediate fixes.

“Too often, it seems, we project our values onto Russians,” Dunn said, “telling them they need a recycling program or environmentally sound diapers, when kids are dying in the streets because the big industrial cities don’t have scrubbers for their factories or treatment for their water.”

Russian trash experts, however, do not want to delay their recycling programs.

They are desperate to resurrect the old Soviet thriftiness before the American use-and-toss mentality becomes too entrenched.

“We’re returning to the old ways,” Grossman said. “It’s a very important moment for our society.”