TASS, March 20. The Norilsk Nickel Company (Nornickel) will maintain the pace of the Clean Norilsk program implementation to clean up the city from accumulated harm, the company's Vice President for Ecology and Industrial Safety Stanislav Seleznev told TASS.

The Clean Norilsk program kicked off in 2021. Its term is 10 years, and investments will make 40 billion rubles ($434 million). Over that time, the plan is to pull down about 500 facilities, to remove 2 million tons of waste and 600,000 tons of scrap metal.

"The pace of the city cleanup remains. In 2024, we plan to pull down about 50 buildings and structures, to clean the area of up to 600,000 square meters, and to revegetate land on up to 100 hectares," the company's representative said, adding investments over the current year would make more than 3 billion rubles ($33 million).

Since 2021, when the program began, the company has organized pulling down of about 350 buildings and structures, 1 million tons of garbage have been removed, an area of more than 4 million square meters has been cleaned, and the total cost of the program, together with the equipment cost, has amounted to 14.5 billion rubles ($157 million), he added.

Under the program, Nornickel continues to pull down the closed Nickel plant, he said. In 2016, the company under its environmental program stopped the Nickel Plant in Norilsk, founded in the 1940s. Thus, harmful emissions into the atmosphere were cut by 35%. Production processes were transferred to Nornickel's other assets in Norilsk and on the Kola Peninsula.