Mikhail Mishustin: “Caring for the environment is above all caring for the people, who should breathe fresh air and drink fresh water, for the health of our children and a long life for our senior citizens. However, a responsible attitude to the environmental agenda also includes active use of technologies for achieving these goals.”
Mikhail Mishustin’s opening remarks:
Mikhail Mishustin chairs strategic session on the national project Ecological Well-Being
Colleagues,
We continue to hold strategic sessions. Today, we will discuss our main environmental protection tasks, which are fundamental for implementing the national goal of ecological well-being set by the President.
Caring for the environment is above all caring for the people, who should breathe fresh air and drink fresh water, for the health of our children and a long life for our senior citizens. However, a responsible attitude to the environmental agenda also includes active use of technologies for achieving these goals, as well as a package of measures stimulating our people and businesses to contribute to protecting the environment and nature. This includes energy saving, waste sorting to increase the volume of product recycling, volunteering for rare plant and animal protection projects, as well as many other initiatives that enjoy public demand.
We are rightfully proud of Russia’s natural wealth, and our efforts to preserve it, which the Government has been doing for over five years within the national project Ecology, are extremely important.
Next year, all these practices and achievements, as well as new initiatives will be incorporated into a new national project designed to enhance the standards and quality of environmental protection with support from all the interested parties, constituent entities of the Russian Federation, environmental organisations and, of course, members of the Government. We will do this with due regard for the President’s instructions, considering that he always pointed out that the traditions of saving nature and improving the environmental situation in Russia would be carried on.
I will briefly outline some of our best achievements.
We are actively developing the sector of processing solid municipal waste. Over half of them are now sorted at the new infrastructure facilities – there are over 250 of them. However, this figure must be raised to 100 percent, of course.
A large amount of work concerns the disposal of hazardous waste, including at sites such as the Krasny Bor waste landfill, the reclamation of which is ongoing. I know that Dmitry Patrushev is monitoring these issues. Considerable success has been reported in the city of Usolye-Sibirskoye (Irkutsk Region), where the ecological environment is to be restored after the decontamination of the area, as per the President’s instructions. It has been proposed to create there a modern green chemistry cluster where industrial waste will be used as raw materials.
Overall, work at over 130 landfills and 80 most hazardous facilities has been completed under the Clean Country federal project.
Another step in this sphere was the establishment of six ecotechnology parks in federal districts, which will help create closed cycle enterprises and hence the recycling of industrial and municipal waste.
Substantial progress has been achieved under the General Cleaning federal project. During our recent trip to Magadan, we saw what had been done to remove abandoned vessels from the local bay, which has greatly improved our opinion.
Similar measures are being taken in other regions. By the end of this year, over 200 such objects are to be removed from the littoral area.
Much is being done under the experiment launched to reduce air emissions in 12 large industrial centres. These efforts are also being taken in 29 other cities and not only at industrial facilities. We continue to renovate municipal transport by converting buses to NGV fuel. We are modernising boiler houses and connecting private households to gas mains. We have moved ahead, but there is still a lot to be done.
We will continue with the reforestation effort, the cleaning of water bodies, and the creation of conditions for the maintenance of biological diversity. Over the past six years, we have established 23 specially protected natural areas, which are extremely popular with ecotourists. Over 14 million people visited our national parks last year. At the same time, we must ensure a balanced approach so that ecotourism does not increase the burden on the parks’ animal population.
