Specialists of the State Regulatory Service (SRS) conducted an unscheduled inspection of officials of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources and found evidence of their interference in the activities of business entities and artificially creating obstacles to the development of economic activities in the field of hazardous waste management.
This information was made public by the Professional Association of Environmentalists of the World (PAEW), which initiated the inspection.
Representatives of the SRS, in particular, examined the actions of Artem Semenov, Chief Specialist of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, and Oleksandr Chernyshev, Head of the Department for Monitoring Compliance with License Conditions.
And here's what they found:
- Officials of the Ministry of Environment did not register separate applications for checking the compliance of the material and technical base of the license applicant in the waste management information system.
- Without researching the issues, they established the inadequacy of the material and technical base of individual license applicants.
- The same authorized officials of the Ministry of Environment carried out inspections of various license applicants at different places of their proceedings at the same time.
- They violated the requirements for drawing up acts based on the results of inspections. In particular, the acts were drawn up not on the form of the licensing authority, not in electronic form, without using the waste management information system, without imposing electronic signatures, and the approved form of the act was also edited.
- Officials of the Ministry of Environment made decisions regarding individual economic entities on the compliance of their material and technical base with the Technical requirements for the operation of waste incineration plants and waste co-incineration plants, which will come into force only from 09.05.2024, that is, they are not yet in effect.
- Individual license applicants were required to provide documents not provided for by law.
- When deciding on the conformity of the material and technical base of individual license applicants, another type of economic activity was indicated in the acts.
We will remind you that the Association of Environmental Professionals (PAEW) warned about a possible crisis in the hazardous waste management market, which will arise due to the impossibility of issuing licenses, at the end of last year. The reason for this situation was the fact that the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted the resolution "On the approval of the "License conditions for conducting business activities on hazardous waste management" 5 months later than expected. Thus, companies from 6 months, which Law No. 2320-IX "About "waste management" refers to the preparation of new documents, only one remains.
In January the European Business Association (EBA) also called on the government to take urgent measures to restore the work of companies in the field of hazardous waste management, because from January 9, 2024, the previous licenses for conducting economic activities in the management of hazardous waste "lost" their validity.
In February, experts of the Association of Environmental Professionals noted that the hazardous waste management market has been in chaos for almost 1.5 months, as the entire industry has been in the "shadow".
As EcoPolitic reported, as of the end of March of this year, only 9 companies in Ukraine received licenses to carry out economic activities for the management of hazardous waste, 6 of which are narrowly targeted or issued for the enterprises' own needs. Most Ukrainian hazardous waste processing enterprises have lost their licenses.
