Environmentally friendly moscow

Snow ploughed off Moscow streets is no longer dumped into the capital’s rivers but is recycled. Vremya MN reports from a snow-melting station in Moscow’s Eastern Administrative District.

We get right behind a truck piled high with a greyish mass and shadow it, wait­ing for it to stop in a quiet place on the embankment and dump the slush into the Yauza. But no, the truck goes on to where it should. A dozen or so similar tracks lining up along the road indicate that we have reached a snow-melting station.

Crushers grind through ice and packed snow. The machines are equipped with sand traps to sift out the sand and gar­bage that come with the slush. The melt water is fed into the city sewer where it goes through all stages of cleaning, and returns to the rivers.

“Halt!” an operator suddenly shouts, pressing a red button. A rubber tire had found its way into the crusher with the snow. It is removed and taken to a spe­cial garbage container, and the operation is resumed.

On average, up to 36 million cubic meters of snow falls on Moscow in the winter season. Of course the greater part of the stuff does not melt. The snow is very dirty: It contains the entire periodic table plus garbage. Two years ago the city authorities forbade snow dumping into the Moskva and Yauza rivers. Yet the question immediately arose: What was to be done with it? Dry snow dumping grounds, com­mon in Europe, where snow lies until spring and melts naturally, require a lot of land, which is very expensive in Moscow. So snow melting stations were set up. This is the third winter season that snow has been recycled at facilities that have no counterpart abroad or elsewhere in Russia. Original­ly the snow smelters worked on natural gas, but then Mayor Luzhkov quipped that melting snow with gas was tanta­mount to firing a stove with bank notes. So a more economical project was developed.

“Since the beginning of the current win­ter season, the snow-melting stations of the Mosvodokanal city utility has recycled more than five million cubic meters of snow, as compared to a total of three mil­lion cubic meters in the past season,” Renat Zinatullin, deputy head of Mosvodokanal’s snow melting administration, says proud­ly. As a matter of fact, he has even more cause to be proud: In the winter season, 27 new stations have been opened, each recycling 3,500 cubic meters of snow a day, or approximately 300 truckfuls. The new project is already producing results. According to Vladimir Shuvalov, head of the Moscow city Sanitation and Epidemi­ology Inspectorate Environmental Moni­toring Department, the chemical compo­sition of the water in the Moskva and Yau­za rivers has visibly improved in the past three years. True, the bacteriological com­position has remained unchanged.

Incidentally, a representative of the Nizhny Novgorod city administration that we met at the snow melting station, was high­ly enthusiastic about what he saw there, indicating that his city was interested in borrowing Moscow’s experience.

Yekaterina Babkova

Vremya MN 10/12 2007