TASS, September 11. In 2024, the Taymyr Nature Reserves' management expects to begin in 2024 the removal of earlier collected man-made waste from the Putorana Plateau, which has remained there since the time those territories were not specially protected, the management's press service told TASS.
Man-made waste had accumulated in the Putorana Nature Reserve, in particular near Lake Ayan, before that area was granted the status of a specially protected nature area. The waste is mostly what was left after expeditions of Soviet geologists, after surveys, polar explorers and fishers and hunters - scrap metal and containers with fuel and lubricants. The biggest problem in removing that waste is that there is practically no land route to the Putorana Plateau.
"The nature reserve has been undertaking every effort to remove waste from the territory: a feasibility study to remove these landfills is ready, contractors are ready, but our own funds are not sufficient. Thus, we have applied to the Ministry of Natural Resources asking to allocate special funding for these works. We expect the money will come in 2024," the press service said.
In summer, 2019, the Taymyr Nature Reserves decided to make a cleanup on their own. The Norilsk Nickel Company (Nornickel) supported them under the charity program dubbed World of New Opportunities. On the shores of Lake Ayan, the nature reserve staff and volunteers collected more than 700 empty barrels and prepared them for further transportation, and barrels with fuel and lubricants were fixed at their locations to avoid spills. In the spring of 2021, Konstantin Prosekin, ex-director of the Taymyr Nature Reserves, told TASS that optimistic estimates said the removal of accumulated waste would take 5-10 years due to long distances, difficult weather conditions and the cargo specifics - it may be handled by a licensed company only. The cleanup's estimated cost was quoted at about 25 million rubles ($258,000). In the past summer, the waste, scattered across the nature reserve, was prepared for transportation jointly with the Ministry of Emergency Situations (during interdepartmental exercises on the Taymyr), the Norilsk Development Agency, and companies - Norilsk Nickel, Hydrotechnologies of Siberia, and Neftetank.
The Taymyr Nature Reserves is the largest protected area in Russia, organized in the spring of 2013, as a merger of three Siberian northern reserves - the Putorana, the Great Arctic and the Taymyr. The reserves' total area is almost 12 million hectares.
The Putorana Plateau is a huge mountain range in the Krasnoyarsk Region's north. Many folk tales of the northern peoples are connected with it. The plateau hides many lakes, rivers and canyons, and it has the largest number of waterfalls in Russia. Putorana lakes mostly are isolated from the outer world, and the fish in each of them is unlike the fish in neighboring reservoirs.