The Krasny Bor Landfill: A Chemical Chernobyl Has Already Begun
Krasny Bor, popularly nicknamed “the Chemical Chernobyl,” is the largest chemical waste landfill in the Northwest. The approximate two million tons of “chemistry” that has accumulated here over the last 45 years pose a real threat to everything located a few kilometers from St. Petersburg. In the early 90s of the last century, the
Northern Capital’s administration announced its determination to neutralize this landfill. A decision was passed to build a chemical waste processing plant on its territory. For 20 years, billions of rubles have been invested in its construction.
However, the plant has still yet to be finished. In the meantime, the landfill has begun to spread into the environment.
In every joke there’s an element of truth…
There was a tale that went around St. Peterburg’s Committee for Environmental
Protection, which has been in charge of Krasny Bor since 2003. One of the
Committee’s leaders was standing next to a map carved in the clay wall of the excavation, explaining the safety of their work to a delegation. Suddenly a gust of wind rips off his cap. Before it could reach the ground, the fumes from the slurry had dissolved the hat right before the shocked public’s eyes.
Even if this is a joke, there’s a great deal of truth to it. Krasny Bor seriously collects the most hazardous and dangerous “chemistry,” from industry, agriculture, and households—pesticides, batteries, old accumulators, expended florescent lights.
They also collect wastes in liquid and paste form: chemical reagents, electroplating, acids, chromium salts, beryllium, lead, petroleum products, petroleum waste, extremely hazardous and highly hazardous wastes of the I-II class.
“On one hand, the Cambrian clay in which the toxic waste is stored should have been a reliable enough shield to prevent the soil and ground waters from becoming contaminated,” says Aleksei Gurniev, the general director of the scientific research organization Center for Public Works and Waste Management—“On the other hand, serious errors and violations were allowed during the laying of the landfill, as well as during further processes of its exploitation.”
Under a blue sky
“First and foremost, the landfill was built in the wrong place,” continues Aleksei
Gurniev.—“According to article 2.2 of the 2.02.28-85 building regulations, a landfill for toxic industrial waste should be constructed below a drinking water intake.
Krasny Bor is located above St. Petersburg’s Vodokanal intake. What’s more, it’s only 6.5 kilometers away from the Neva. The size of the site should allow for an accumulation period of 20-25 years.”—this is required by the same building regulation. Our landfill has been in use since 1970, that is, almost 45 years. The list of violations can go on.

Perhaps the most critical relates to the disposal of liquid wastes. According to the law, wastes of different classes should be stored in separate specialized plots. Here, all liquid wastes are poured into the “general pot,”—without being deliquefied or neutralized beforehand.
Furthermore, the operating pits are located literally under the blue sky. Their levels are constantly increased with rain and snow. In order for the poisonous slurry not to overflow, the pits are bermed with clay. As a result, the slurry mirror has ascended 5-7 meters above ground level. There are five such pits in the landfill, which according to some estimates, contain around 700,000 cubic meters of toxic materials.
The hypothetical tragic scenario is as follows: If we are hit with extremely heavy and prolonged rainfalls, or unusually high floods, the dams could be washed away. In this case, the pits’ contents together with the flood water and dams will inevitably rush towards the Never. The massive surge of extremely dangerous poison into a river used for drinking water would be a catastrophe for the city’s five million inhabitants.
The fairy tale about the white bull
20 years have passed and the plant was still not put into operation. Not because it was suddenly forgot about. For two decade, Krasny Bor was not only the center of attention of the regional authorities, but the federal ones as well. The evidence being its constant financing, as well as its inclusion in the State of the Russian Federation’s
Environment Protection Program for 2012-2020.
The press erupted three times over the huge fires that occurred at Krasny Bor during 2006, 2008, and 2011. The chemical dumps lit up again because of the personnel’s carelessness and lack of experience. Nearby residents were suffocated, the poisonous clouds floated all the way to St. Petersburg… the fire department put out the fire, life went on as usual.
And politicians never tired of promising the quick unveiling of the long awaited plant. Valentin Matvienko demonstrated concern over Petersburg’s safety, Gregory
Poltavchenko really took the bull by the horns with a mandate to finish the plant’s first stage by 2014, and to have it completely done by January of 2015.
2014 is coming to an end, and not a single one of these promises have been carried out.
Billions into oblivion?
Now for a few numbers. According to the website www.gz-spb.ru
, in November
2007, the company SU-12 Trest 32 received 483,128,759 rubles for constructing the first stage of the pilot enterprise for the processing and disposing of toxic waste

from St. Petersburg and the Leningradsky Region. Three years later, in November
2010, the same contractors receive 100,224,936 rubles from the budget. The situation is repeated in 2012: in October, SU-12 Trest 32 receives 132,827,350 rubles. All together, that’s over 716 million rubles from Petersburg’s budget.
Jumping ahead, I’ll say that today, I can’t call to mind a single project that was developed in the mid 90s in relation to the state research center, Applied Chemistry.
According to our source’s figures, part of the technical equipment disappeared from the building for biological waste neutralization. The building where nonorganic materials were to be burned stands empty and is collapsing under atmospheric precipitation. Having stood idle for so long, the sewage processing line is in disrepair. Furthermore, it turns out the line for processing storm runoff is only equipped for city waste water, not toxic effluents.
According to HELCOM’s report, during the period of 1997-2011, St. Petersburg’s administration alone has spent 2,801,845,700 on the pilot enterprise. In 2012,
42,400,000 rubles from the federal budget and 119,927,000 rubles from St.
Petersburg’s were invested in its construction. And that is far from all of the money.
According to figures from the Belona Ecological Defense Center, in the last 14 years, more than 15 billion rubles have been spent on the landfill’s development.
“A neutralizing plant, which would forever remove the risk of a chemical
Chernobyl—the contamination of St. Petersburg’s water sources—could have been built years ago for 3 billion rubles,” says Aleksei Gurnev. But the endless construction continues, ignoring all conceivable risks. Thus, here we are dealing either with the blatant mismanagement, or the deliberate theft of public funds.
The landfill of bad luck
While politicians continued to spin tales, the processing plant project became outdated. The following opinion was expressed on behalf of the St. Petersburg’s expert community, in particular, that of Semyon Gordishevsky, the chairman of the
Committee on the Ecological, Industrial, and Technological Security of the Union of
Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of St. Petersburg, as well as chairman of the St.
Petersburg Ecological Union.
“From today’s point of view, the combustion technology, which was the basis of this
20-year-old Applied Chemistry project, is inadmissible,” announced Gordishevsky,
“to burn hundreds of thousands of accumulated ‘chemistry,’ when 1 ton produces 4 tons of even more hazardous combustion products, would mean posing a threat to millions of people. We need different technological solutions.” It’s interesting that the Applied Chemistry’s chief designer agreed with the expert’s opinion. In twenty years, science has progressed, views on processing technology have changed.
Gordishevsky presented appropriate technological solutions to the deputies of the
Legislative Assembly and Government of St. Petersburg at roundtables and

conferences. And, it would seem, the officials reacted. This summer, the new head of the Environmental Committee, Valery Matveev (whose been leading it since the fall of 2013), announced to the press, that it was necessary to correct the plans for the plant. On August 4, 2014, the Committee issued a state contract to the Peuru Rus company for more than 49 million rubles. Using these funds, the company was supposed to develop the project’s logistics in terms of its chosen technological innovation, pass ecological and state inspections, hold public hearings, and develop a working documentation of the plant’s construction.
“On one hand, they listened to the public,” comments Semyon Gordishevsky. “On the other, the landfill’s situation is again surrounded by an informational blockade. We don’t know which project Peuru Rus is preparing. According to our findings, they’re suggesting combustion again, which, in this case, is simply inadmissible. In
September, we went to the Committee to request that they inform us about their decisions. We have still to receive an answer.”
The sprawling “hot” spot
There is no way the mistakes ingrained during the landfill’s construction, its employees’ lack of compliance with rules and regulations about handling toxicants, and the officials’ schemes to pilfer public funds could not have consequences: This
“hot” spot is sprawling into the environment.
“When using clay as an embankment, the structure of the Cambrian clay breaks down. As a result, a clay embankment may not guarantee the complete isolation of aggressive industrial liquid waste,” wrote the Leningradsky Province’s interregional environmental prosecutor no.2-44b-02 in a letter from 28.04.2014. According to test results of samples taken from St. Petersburg’s surface and ground water, the
Krasny Bor Landfill has been systematically identified as containing levels that exceed the maximum permissible concentration of substances such as: petroleum products, cadmium, lead, nickel, zinc, formaldehyde, mercury, phenol.
In 2010, Greenpeace took water samples from the main canal that flows from the
Krasny Bor territory into the Bolshyaya Izhorka River. The results were as follows:
The mercury levels were 56 times higher than the maximum permissible level set for fishing areas; polychlorinated biphenyls—650 times higher; phenol—2.1 thousand times higher. Let’s recall that the Bolshaya Izhorka flows into the Izhor
River, which flows into the Neva, from which Petersburg drinks…
Inhabitants of the nearest towns—Krasny Bor, Feklistovo, Myshkino—confirm, that the landfill’s overfilled pits constantly bleed into the main canal. In April 2014, the ecological organization, Green Front, also made an announcement about this. As for the North West District’s Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources
Department, which conducted a test for publication on 47 News, gave us this answer: “28.05.2015 We have completed an unscheduled inspection of the Krasny
Bor Landfill site. According to the laboratory studies conducted during our

inspection, it has been established that the Krasny Bor Landfill discharges runoff containing levels that exceed maximum permissible concentrations into the main canal, which flows into the B. Izhorka.“
According to figures found by the B.E. Vedeneev Russian Research Institute for
Hydro-Technology, in the 40 years it has been in use, the landfill has released around 14 million cubic meters of polluted runoff into surface and groundwater.
The pits’ contents can be found in the landfill’s neighboring fields and rivers. Simply put, the “hot” spot of Russia’s Baltic coast has been spreading through the environment.
Fear is a profitable business
“What’s most interesting is that the ecological drama unfolding in Kransy Bor is not hard to stop,” says Semyon Gordyshevky, “First and foremost, we need to protect the pits from atmospheric precipitation. We can’t let them flood in the first place!
Then filter the water from them. Further, determine a safe method for storing chemical mass, which would be an order of magnitude smaller. The landfill will no longer be a threat to the environment. Then it would be possible to calmly, without putting stress on our nerves, search out safe processing technology. Also, we’ll have to determine how the plant will be constructed. Although not quietly, on the sidelines, but out in the open with experts from the public.”
Well why then has this spectacle been going on for 20 years?
“In 2006, a tripartite agreement was established between the Ministry of Natural
Resources and the St. Petersburg Administration’s Finance and
Environmental Committees to build a French processing plant for 18 million euros,” told Oleg Krupnov, who was head of St. Petersburg’s Environmental Committee from 2002-2010, “This agreement helped facilitate a meeting between the presidents of France and Russia, Vladimir Putin and Jacque Chirac. This technology provides pre-dehydration. The project would be fantastically profitable to the city— it would have been paid off in two years. However, senior officials smothered it because it’s more profitable for them to draw the construction out.”
Generally speaking, when it comes to this story, it’s hard to draw any other conclusions. It looks as though the landfill has become a budgetary hole, though which torrents of funding have passed. Its ecological hazard has become the argument by which more and more streams of financing have been created. Fear, as it’s been made clear, is a profitable business.
If only such politics did not create a real tragedy for the local population. According to the Russian Research Institute of Hygiene, Occupational Pathology, and Human
Ecology, the sickness rate is high in settlements located within 3 kilometers of the
Krasny Bor Landfill. For example, “children in the town of Krasny Bor suffer from allergic rhinitis at a rate higher than regional and average regional indicators (in

2007, the rate was 11.47 times higher),” says the institute’s report, “In 2008, cases of asthma increased significantly, at 9.52 times higher than the average regional rate.” These statistics, of course, include neither the young nor old citizens of St.
Petersburg, who have been “lucky” enough to drink tap water laced with the landfill’s bad luck.
After 20 years of active discussion, and demonstrations of bustling activity in the media over solving the problem of Krasny Bor, it must be noted: the officials have really done it—the chemical Chernobyl near Petersburg has practically begun.
Who will answer for it?