The round-table "Needs and possibilities of solving solid waste management problems in the cities of Ukraine" was held in Ivano-Frankivsk on May 27-28, 2010.

Municipal Governance and Sustainable Development Program, implemented by UNDP in Ukraine, organized national round-table to share experiences and available practices in solving problems of solid waste management (SW) at the local level, as well as to develop joint proposals of Ukraine's cities on introduction of changes to the current legislation on SW management.
 

The round-table participants visited sites of best practices in the c.Ivano-Frankivsk, i.e. the plant with the sorting line, the community organizations that organize separate collection and sorting of waste, as well as municipal Center of Administrative Services Provision.

The event was attended by Andre Olshevski, the Swiss Resource Centre and Consultancies for Development (skat) Water Supply and Wastewater Specialist, Oksana Garnets, Senior Project Coordinator of the Swiss-Ukrainian Decentralization Support to Ukraine project DESPRO, Vyacheslav Sorokovskyi, DESPRO Expert on Decentralization.

Background information: The population of Ukraine is provided with the system of solid waste removal by 70% only. 50 million cubic meters of waste is accumulated annually with the average of 300-400 kg of waster per-capita. Only 3% of the total waste is recycled, while the rest is placed on landfills and dumps that do not meet any environmental criteria. Over the past ten years the amount of per-capita waste increased by 40%.
The capacities of most landfills and dumps have already exhausted their resource: 242 of them are closed, 248 are overloaded and more than 1100 do not meet environmental safety standards. About 3300 unauthorized dumps emerge in the private sector annually due to the lack of the proper solid waste collection system.
The pace of waste accumulation grows annually, thus making the SW management problem a major issue in the field of environment protection and creation of the safe conditions of life for the population.