BaltHazar Project: Taking the Struggle Against Mercury Waste to a New Level 

New Bottom-Up Measures to Combat Hazardous Waste in the Kaliningrad Region

 

“What’s the lifecycle of an energy-saving lamp?”  The question was followed by complete silence in the class of ten-year-olds in Gusev Municipality’s elementary school – a situation rarely faced or welcomed by their teacher. Such mind games were the core of the thematic classes held to over 3,500 7 to 18 year olds in the spring of 2011. An information campaign carried out in the Kaliningrad region of the Russian Federation was targeted at the municipality’s residents. Its aim was to raise awareness of hazardous waste management and to involve the communities in brainstorming ways to deal with it. 

 

The program did not only explain how mercury is harmful to the environment and people, it also gave recommendations on environmentally sound ways of handling hazardous waste through booklets, leaflets, banners together with interactive project related websites. A video-clip on the issue was also broadcast on regional TV channels. Other activities included a questionnaire which was handed out to almost 2,000 participants, and a drawing competition - ‘The Future of the Baltic is in our Hands’ - organized for the region’s children. 

 

Until the start of the BaltHazar project, no official system for collecting hazardous waste from households was in place in the Russian Federation. The purpose of the project is to reduce the loading of mercury compounds to the Baltic Sea by creating both an effective system of collection of mercury containing waste from households and deactivation of the waste in the Gusevsky district. The activities began in 2010 and are aimed to be completed by 2012. After a detailed assessment of the current system and its inconsistencies, this multilevel approach was brought forward to develop an environmentally sound management system for harmful waste. The project’s pre-study on mercury waste treatment showed that more than 1.1 million mercury containing lamps were imported into the Kaliningrad region in 2009 alone.  

  

In order to enhance the environmentally sound way of treating waste containing mercury, and following the recommendations of both Russian and European experts, it was decided to set up a safe treatment plant for such waste on IP Iliin’s site - a waste treatment company in Gurievsky. The plant can process up to 300 lamps per hour and has the capacity to handle the whole annual loading of mercury waste should it initiate two nine-hour shifts per day. To ensure the safe collection and transportation of the waste from both private households and municipal institutions to the treatment plant, a special truck was brought in. The plant’s operations were presented to the Balthazar project stakeholders and authorities on 26 May 2011. 

 

Before celebrating the successful outcome of the project – establishing a sound mercury waste treatment system - some hurdles still remain in establishing an environmentally sound mercury waste treatment scheme in the whole Kaliningrad region. Even though the survey results showed a relatively high level of awareness on the hazardous effects of mercury to public health and the environment, as well as a positive attitude towards separate collection system in one pilot municipality, the overall impact on the whole Kaliningrad region remains somewhat vague. This problem will partly be tackled by extending the best practices for raising awareness and collecting waste for treatment to three additional BALTHAZAR pilot municipalities and the city of Kaliningrad, which will effectively cover the majority of the population in the whole Kaliningrad region. This will be done in cooperation with a German-Russian project - which is within the frame of the Advisory Assistance Programme of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment - and the Federal Environment Agency.  

 

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Background

The Balthazar project (2009-2011) is funded by the European Parliament Pilot Project Facility through the European Commission Delegation in Moscow. The Project is managed by the Project Implementation Unit established in the HELCOM Secretariat, while the practical implementation is carried out by the Russian St. Petersburg Public Organization ‘Ecology and Business’. The project expects to develop comprehensive models to manage hazardous and agricultural waste in Russia as a contribution to the National Implementation Programme for the HELCOM Baltic Sea Action Plan. These include designs for pilot cases for investments adapted to a particular local and sectoral legislative framework. See more on the project at: http://www.helcom.fi/projects/balthazar

Provided with the support of the EU