A scandal has erupted around the unauthorized dumping of medical waste. It was supposed to be disposed of near Astana, but instead, it was illegally transported to Kostanay, where it was improperly stored.

Dream City, Dump City…

According to the press service of the specialized environmental prosecutor’s office of the region, LLP «A» was declared the winner in seven state procurement procedures for the removal and disposal of hazardous medical waste. Since the capacities of the LLP for disposal are located in the suburbs of Astana, the unscrupulous contractor decided not to transport them to their disposal facility every three days, as required by law, but to illegally store them in Kostanay.

All these actions were accompanied by a failure to comply with elementary safety requirements. For the transportation of hazardous goods to the capital, the enterprise used not specialized transport, but a regular cargo vehicle rented through a mobile application.

What will happen to the unscrupulous LLP remains to be seen, but it is obvious that this is not the first case when cities in Kazakhstan flagrantly disregard the safety rules for disposing of hazardous waste.

Fine as Punishment

The so-called disposers have thrown away all sorts of things in crowded and not so crowded places: amputated body parts in plastic containers, used syringes, bloodied vials. Local residents report such findings. Concerned about the environmental situation, they turn to the authorities, who in turn try to take measures — they fine unscrupulous companies engaged in such business.

Interestingly, no licenses are required to make money from waste disposal. Private companies can engage in this. All that is needed is to rent specialized transport, premises for storage, and furnaces or crushing equipment for destroying biomaterial. Nothing more is required.

Many use crematoria for waste disposal. Typically, they can only burn biological material, animal carcasses, but not plastic. However, they burn everything in them. Since this process is not controlled, there is nothing to complain about here.

Disposal is left to ecologists, even though this activity is more regulated. As a result, sanitary inspectors say one thing, ecologists say another, sometimes this differs greatly, there are no unified industry requirements for the incineration of medical waste.

Currently, there are about 200 companies in Kazakhstan engaged in medical waste disposal. Until clear standards are introduced, entrepreneurs can build homemade furnaces for 5 million tenge, rather than buy imported incinerators for 70 million tenge. This is because by installing quality equipment, entrepreneurs do not gain any competitive advantage. In Europe, waste is mechanically fed into the furnace, without human intervention. This helps to add waste evenly, rather than fill the furnace to the top at once. In our country, this is done so that you don’t have to ‘strain’ unnecessarily.

Supervision is necessary

In addition, private individuals, concerned with the sense of profit, try to further ‘reduce’ the working time, and therefore sometimes do not process the waste, but dump it in the nearest steppe or in the neighboring settlement, so to speak, in its ‘original’ form.

So a few years ago, several tons of medical waste were abandoned near Astana. As law enforcement officers later found out, the medical waste belonged to the National Cardiac Surgery Center in Astana. The company that was supposed to dispose of them — LLP «Kazpererabotka». For violating the rules of storage and disposal of medical waste, the company was fined 20 MRP (50,500 tenge).

Heroes of another incident — waste disposers from the village of Altynsarina were fined 290,000 tenge. After that, the company calmly continued to work.

To at least somehow control this sphere, the state has obliged waste owners to annually provide reports on the work done. But, as we see, this does not help much, because anything can be reflected on paper. So now the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of National Economy are discussing transferring the waste disposal business to a group of objects subject to special control.

They are discussing… for the second year.

Smoke without fire?

Companies that deal with the disposal of hazardous waste exist in every region of Kazakhstan.

As experts note, separate statistics on such companies and their number are not kept. Financial resources for the disposal of medical waste in hospitals come from the Social Health Insurance Fund. There is no mandatory and uniform tariff for waste disposal, as it is considered and is in a competitive environment. Most of such waste is incinerated, and the ash is sent to landfills for solid household waste. We do not have separate landfills for such purposes. This is not normal.

Another problem is that not all companies crush waste before sending it to the furnace. Even if special filters are installed at the enterprise, the smoke will be ‘above the roof’. As can be concluded, there are many problems in the waste processing industry in Kazakhstan, and as long as the country’s entrepreneurs pursue purely commercial interests in this field, the country will slowly continue to approach an environmental catastrophe.