MOSCOW, April 14. /TASS/. Russia's President Vladimir Putin is concerned about quantities of non-recycling waste and ordered to the People's Front to control this issue.
"Waste is a problem; we produce about 5.4-5.6 billion tons a year, and only half is recycled, and the other half is stored in ground," he said during an annual televised Q&A session on Thursday.
Putin said the sphere of waste recycling "is very criminalized," and thus ordered to the People's Front to control the situation with recycling.
The president said back in 2014 was adopted a special law on construction of waste recycling plants.
"But those plants could be constructed, and they would work effectively, everything would be economically reasonable, if we have the so-called ecology duty," Putin said, adding the duty will become payable in early 2017 not to overload producers.
He said there are three variants to settle the problem: where waste producers may have their own recycling plants, where companies may hire jointly an operator, where the government would be responsible for construction of plants. The latter variants would be applicable to "complicated" waste - batteries, television sets, refrigerators, etc.