Press Release: Russian Authorities Okay New Waste Landfill in Sochi Mountains in Secret Meeting

With less than six months to go before the official start of the Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia is cutting more and more corners to finish the disastrous project on time, turning the mountains of Sochi into a ticking time bomb for the local residents and the formerly untouched wilderness of its protected nature reserves.

In a recent decision at a meeting that was unannounced and closed to the press Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak officially decided to turn what was only in 2010 a section of the Sochi National Park, a site of primary oak forest, into a waste landfill.

"Agree on the placement of displaced soil and construction waste that accumulates during Olympic construction in the Akhshtyr quarry," say the official minutes from the secret meeting that took place on July 12 in Sochi with all key regional and local officials, heads of construction companies, Sochi Organizing Committee officials, and not a single representative of the public or an environmental group. EWNC has acquired a copy of the document and is making it available to the public.

The said site close to a small mountain village of Akhshtyr, part of the greater Sochi area, was covertly dug up in 2010 after being simply cut from the Sochi National Park. Officials pretended that it is being developed as a fire water reservoir and a place where the soil that is taken out to make way for Olympic road to the mountain cluster in Krasnaya Polyana will be stored.

Despite concerns expressed to the officials behind the construction of the road and the "reservoir" by UNEP monitors, and an order by then-president Dmitry Medvedev to halt illegal extraction of inert materials in the protected zones of Sochi, works were never halted, and round-the-clock extraction of limestone continued to produce the vast quantities of inert material needed for the massive Olympic construction.

To clear the area for the quarry, part of the forest with endangered species of trees were destroyed, which is also illegal by Russian law. Moreover, digging through the porous karst type rock in such quarries destabilized entire mountainsides, causing several landslides.

The mining site near Akhshtyr, now called the "Akhshtyr quarry" by officials, remained illegal for two years. By the time the authorities organized the formal "public hearings" required by the law in 2012, all limestone on the site was already gone.

As Sochi is faced with mountains of construction, household, and other waste and is required to keep up appearances of "Zero Waste" and other environmental principles announced by the Sochi Organizing Committee, it is no wonder the decision to turn this illegal quarry into a landfill is taken in secret.

No project has yet been approved to turn the quarry into a landfill for construction waste, which can include any debris from the vast amounts of knocked down properties in Sochi that made way to the Olympic venues. To make a landfill in karst topography of porous limestone without any sort of recultivation project is a catastrophic mistake.

Moreover, we can say from experience that household and even toxic waste is frequently placed at Sochi landfills that are restricted only to construction waste. Such violations have been going on for many months at the so-called Loo landfill that is officially closed in northern Sochi, where runoff is polluting springs that run into the Black Sea.

The Akhshtyr site not only sits on unstable grounds but is also in close proximity to the Mzymta river, Sochi's biggest river which provides the city with its drinking water.

For more information contact: og-2014-off@ewnc.org

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