Comparative assessment of municipal solid waste management system in Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan

Issue of the municipal solid waste management is a very urgent problem of the environmental governance in the countries with different level of economic and social development. The aim of the current research is an assessment of the municipal solid waste management systems in Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan based on the BiPRO approach. The common problems of Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus are the absence of the ban for landfilling fixed in the normative documents; landfilling as a main way of the waste treatment; the significant amount of the biodegradable waste located at the dumps; incomplete coverage of population by formal system of the waste collection; underdeveloped capacity of recycling plants; the lack of effective forecasting and planning work in the waste management sphere. The result of the assessment is comparable with the results for countries EU from the third group with the lowest scores for the waste management system - Latvia, Cyprus, Romania, Lithuania, Malta, Bulgaria and Greece. The improvement of the waste management systems in the analysed countries should be associated with improving legislation, tariff policy, current institutions, their rights and responsibilities.