GPS trackers in garbage bags helped Petersburgers find illegal dumps

Petersburgers found illegal dumps using GPS trackers. This was told at a press conference by the authors of the initiative themselves, who decided to trace where the garbage goes from container sites.

On the night of February 10-11, social activists distributed switched-on devices with SIM cards to tanks on different streets of the city. The trackers transmitted SMS messages with the location of the garbage trucks and the final points of the route. According to the activists, it turned out that some waste arrived in the area of ​​Chelyabinskaya Street on the border of the Krasnogvardeisky and Vsevolozhsky districts of St. Petersburg, as well as to the village of Bolshaya Izhora in the Lomonosovsky district of the Leningrad region.

Both sites are illegal dumps, according to public figures who visited the sites and filmed with a quadcopter. So, on the territory near Chelyabinskaya Street, east of the Novaya Okhta residential area, a forest has been cut down, there are municipal solid waste and ash that could have been formed due to the burning of garbage, said one of the organizers of the investigation, municipal deputy Fedor Grudin. He added that a garbage sorting station is officially located near Bolshaya Izhora, but mountains of waste on the ground were also noticed, which should not be. Harmful substances end up in the soil, activists are sure.

According to public activists, one of the official contractors involved in the removal and sorting of garbage in St. Petersburg owns both territories on different rights.

“The regional operator was not ready for the waste reform, he began to give tenders to companies that were also not ready. They did not increase the staff, equipment. <…> Under the pretext that a single operator will save us from landfills, we received new landfills, ”said Savva Fedoseev, one of the organizers of the investigation, consul of the Society.Future movement.

The activists showed the points on the map where the garbage trucks brought the trackers. The devices were located a few tens of meters from those objects, which were announced by the public. The Rosbalt correspondent explained the inconsistency with the peculiarities of the trackers, which show the exact coordinates only during movement, but in a static position, the error reaches 50 meters.

Law enforcement agencies can check the arguments of public figures. Activists collect signatures in support of the investigation, then to send a statement to the official departments.

Earlier, the regional operator NEO, which is called upon to arrange waste disposal in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, published a draft concept for waste management. Ecologists and eco-activists criticized the document. Read more in the Rosbalt article.