The Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine published a draft resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine "On Amendments to the Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine dated October 31, 2023 No. 1137", which provides for an increase in the validity period of waste management declarations from 9 to 15 months.
The agency published the draft resolution and an explanatory note to it on its website.
We see that the officials of the ministry reacted to the critical remarks of specialists regarding problems with obtaining permits in the field of waste management. They propose to the government to extend the validity period of previously received declarations for another six months.
It should be noted that the effect of this resolution does not extend to the economic activity of hazardous waste management.
The Ministry of Environment noted that this draft resolution is designed to ensure the proper implementation of the provisions of the Law of Ukraine "On Waste Management" by business entities that carry out waste processing operations in conditions of armed aggression by the Russian Federation.
We will remind you that the Cabinet of Ministers has already extended the deadline for submitted waste declarations. Yes, at the beginning of June the government prolonged the validity of these documents is for 4 months – until October 9, 2024.
As EcoPolitics wrote earlier, this necessity arose due to significant difficulties with the implementation of the waste management reform in Ukraine. In particular, due to the fact that after the adoption of Framework Law No. 2320-IX "On Waste Management" in June 2022, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the relevant ministry took more than a year and a half to develop the Procedure for Issuing Permits for Waste Treatment Operations. Therefore, entrepreneurs working in this field simply did not have time to physically receive new documents – waste management declarations.
In July, we gave the position of ecologists who stated that 90% of the norms of the law on waste are dead. They drew the attention of officials and the public to the catastrophic situation with permits for waste processing operations. Experts emphasized, that after the completion of the next transition period provided for by the Law of Ukraine "On Waste Management" on July 9, 2024, there were only 2 subjects in the Register of Permits for operations with mixed household waste instead of a potential 794 subjects.
This clearly illustrates the second significant problem in the reform of the waste management industry – the extremely slow pace of issuing new type permit documents to interested enterprises. EcoPolitic calculated that it will take another 5 years to license all Ukrainian companies that process hazardous waste, if the Ministry of Environment does not speed up the issuance of the necessary documents.
At the beginning of October, the Association of Environmental Professionals started sounding the alarm about this problem. Specialists stated that due to the untimely preparation and adoption of normative legal acts to the Law of Ukraine No. 2320-IX "On Waste Management", as well as due to the extremely slow pace of issuing permits by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine, 92% of companies that have licenses for hazardous waste management, on October 10 they will be lost and the field of hazardous waste disposal will be paralyzed.
