Alexander Kozlov, recently appointed head of the Ministry of Natural Resources, noted that it’s necessary to eliminate landfills on the coasts and in national parks.
“The Arctic needs a general cleaning! We will propose a new program for general cleaning of our North. I hope you will be actively involved in this work, and together we will be able to clean up the Arctic of rusting barrels and abandoned iron”, the minister said. “We are talking about empty barrels and other scrap metal that remained in the Arctic since the times of the USSR”.
Alexander Kozlov added that ‘general cleaning’ will also be useful for the development of tourism. According to him, 70 thousand tourists visit the Norwegian Spitsbergen annually, while the Russian Arctic National Park, in which ‘10 thousand tons of barrels have not yet been removed’, only 1000 people.
Business representatives are ready to participate in the cleaning, said Alexander Krutikov, First Deputy Minister for Development of the Far East and the Arctic, in response.
Another problem in the Arctic is municipal solid waste (MSW): “Unfortunately, when the system of MSW circulation was formed, the peculiarities of the North were not taken into account. Today we set this as a task ”, Alexander Kozlov said.
According to the minister, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment will submit proposals on how to coordinate this activity.
Recall that work on cleaning the Arctic from trash in Russia has been carried out for several years every summer. In particular, military ecologists are engaged in this at abandoned training grounds.
The protected areas of the Taimyr peninsula also need cleaning. Thus, last year the Chisto_Ayan project of Taimyr Reserves received grant support from the World of New Opportunities charitable program of the Norilsk Nickel company – 5 million rubles. With this money, they organized an expedition to clear the shores of the beautiful lake Ayan from man-made and household waste.
As the This Is Taimyr previously reported, high-speed Internet is planned in the Arctic, construction has already begun. A network of data centers will also appear in the Russian Arctic, now the northernmost one is in Norilsk.
Text: Ekaterina Maximova, Photo: open sources
