09.08.2018

On August 9, 2018, a meeting on the issues of environmental protection and development of a system for collecting and processing household waste was held under the chairmanship of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

According to the resolution of the Head of the state “On measures for cardinal improvement and development of the waste management system for 2017-2021” of April 21, 2017 a unified system has been formed in this sphere, which previously was not sufficiently organized. As a result of the attention paid to the sphere, it is expected that by the end of the year 62% of the population (22 million people) will be covered by waste removal services. For comparison, in 2016 this indicator was only 22 percent.

In the past 7 months of this year, enterprises of “Toza hudud” (Clean zone), organized in the system of the State Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan on Ecology and Environmental Protection, managed to get income of 49 billion sums. Waste recycling companies are being built at places.

The procedure for assigning sites for providing services on waste disposal through an electronic auction was introduced, a mechanism for attracting entrepreneurs to this activity on the basis of public-private partnership was established, restrictions were imposed on production, sale, import of packages from polymer film, tax incentives were introduced to widely attract foreign investors.

At the meeting it was noted that activity carried out in this direction is not enough, it is necessary to take a number of measures.

In particular, in the current year, 210 units of special equipment were purchased for enterprises of “Toza hudud”. In 2019-2021, it is planned to purchase an additional 510 units, which will increase the coverage of waste collection services to 83 percent.

State committees for investment, ecology and environmental protection were given instructions on development of a proposal for the purchase of 500 additional units of special equipment in three months at the expense of a loan of the Asian Development Bank for further expanding the scale of activities in this direction.

In the part of generating energy from waste, a project worth $55 million has been launched recently in Akhangaran district jointly with the South Korean company Sejin. The project provides for the production of biogas at the landfill site and production of 16 megawatts of electricity – in an amount sufficient to supply 10 thousand homes.

– We must increase the number of such promising projects, – said the President. – And for this, we need to find out why foreign investors show little interest in this sphere. The reason is that the work carried out to solve the systemic problems hindering the attraction of foreign investment is not enough. There is no comprehensive approach to the implementation of investment projects. There are still no mechanisms to supply alternative energy from waste to a single grid, calculate for the delivered energy and gap elimination between tariffs.

It was noted that, in accordance with the current procedure, connection to the unified energy system and payments are applied only to renewable energy sources, the amount of payment for 1 kilowatt/hour is very low – 2 cents. Therefore, investors are not interested in this area.

The leadership of ministries of finance, economy, housing and communal services and the joint-stock company Uzbekenergo was instructed to prepare a draft resolution aimed at solving these problems within two weeks.

At the meeting, responsible managers were tasked to visit the regions within two months, develop investment proposals on waste processing and energy generation, as well as their general parameters, and start implementation of at least 5 relevant projects before the end of the year.

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