A waste sorting station is operating in the Lviv region in the town of Khodoriv, which accepts separately collected resource-rich plastic waste from three of the five Lviv-based waste haulage companies, as well as from other suppliers in the region.
This is stated in the material of the public organization Zero Waste Lviv.
The station is located on the territory of a former printing machine factory. The area of the site is 0.68 hectares. The distance to residential buildings is 150 meters. However, the organization emphasizes that there are no odors or unsanitary conditions.
"Since 2004, we have been engaged in scrap metal. Over time, we realized that the issue of the amount of waste in Ukraine is much more global than scrap metal. We began to develop, we were interested in how it works in Europe. We bought additional equipment, a sorting line, a press. We began to select PET bottles, 10- 15 tons per month. Today, we process almost 10 times more – up to 100 tons. And almost all of them are brought from Lviv," said the owner of the sorting station Mykola Tomin.
It is reported that workers manually sort through about 7-10 tons of garbage brought from Lviv and nearby communities every day on a mechanical line.
"We work so that as little waste as possible enters the landfills and everything that can be recycled is recycled," the station's employees emphasize.
The workers are not ashamed of their work, but willingly talk about the conditions and features, because they understand that they are doing something useful for the environment.
At the sorting station, they say that a full-scale invasion has broken the established system. Up to 50% of enterprises that purchased and processed sorted waste simply ceased to exist. However, thanks to constant monitoring of the market, it is possible to find new enterprises or those that are still afloat.
It was possible to establish systematic work with transporters during the war, and before that sometimes they even purchased and sorted waste from abroad.
In order to increase the amount of waste, they plan to deliver another sorting station, because they barely have time to process everything that is brought from Lviv and its surroundings.
It is noted that the station accepts primary sorted waste from three Lviv carriers, as well as from suppliers from the region. In addition, the company has installed its own containers for collecting PET containers in nearby Zhydachev and collects waste with its garbage truck. Local residents and small businesses also bring in plastic and recyclables such as paper, glass and film.
"Garbage trucks bring and unload all collected recyclables to an open site. To avoid soil and water pollution, this site was concreted. Raw materials are fed to the sorting line by tractors. Along the line, the waste enters the bunker, where 14 female workers work in shifts. Each of them selects from the line "his" kind of waste and throws it into a special hole in the hopper. Underneath the holes are so-called big-bags. Everything valuable gets into them. Workers on the site monitor the filling of the bags and are replacing them," Zero Waste Lviv reports.
As EcoPolitic previously reported, from April 22 schools in Uzhhorod will join the training project waste management – students will sort the garbage produced by their schools.
