Russia: Local Companies Get Greener

Source from:  St. Petersburg Times 12/04/2014

Up to 74 percent of Russians are ready to pay more for products that produce no negative effect on the environment, recent Russian research shows.

However, most Russians associate the idea of a "negative effect on the environment" with a negative effect on health, Yulia Gracheva, director of the St. Petersburg Ecological Union, said at a conference on "Green Production in Russia" organized by Russian daily Vedomosti on Nov. 27.

"But the fact that Russian customers want to buy such products already improves the ecological situation," Gracheva said.

At the same time, only 19 percent of Russians recognize and look for eco labels on products, drastically different, by comparison, to 80 percent of customers in Germany or 92 percent in Japan.

The participants of the conference, who discussed ways of decreasing the industrial burden on the environment in cities, said a number of Russian enterprises are taking steps to improve their manufacturing processes to have less of an impact on the environment, but it is happening slowly.

The most active users of green technologies are often foreign companies working on the St. Petersburg market.

Japan Tobacco International's Petro factory, for instance, introduced a $2.5 million biological/chemical scrubber at its local plant which helps to purify atmospheric emissions, a $2.3 million innovation that eliminates the tobacco smell created during the production of cigarettes. The company also manages to recycle 70 percent of its waste in St. Petersburg, Carlos Perez, director of JTI's engineering support service in the CIS, said at the conference.

"In fact, recycling is an asset which allows saving on disposal costs," Perez said.

Edwin Rosa, vice president of JTI's production process in the CIS, said the company's new system of aroma elimination is "a subject of pride in the factory".

"We are constantly improving our environmental technologies… The investments into such programs for all the years of our work in Russia are counted in millions of dollars," Rosa said.

Oleg Bokov, director of St. Petersburg's Heineken Brewery factory, presented the full-scale program of reorganizing cargo delivery that will both help decrease emissions into the atmosphere and let the company optimize the delivery of its products.

Mikhail Begak, the leading expert of St. Petersburg's Scientific and Research Center of Ecology Safety, said another shining example of ecologically-sound production is Sweden's IKEA, which follows the same self-imposed guidelines everywhere, including in Russia.

At the same time, Begak said that Russia's new federal law Number 219 from 2014, which introduced amendments to the Best Available Technologies or NDT, is a call to decrease the effect of industrial production on the environment.

"The NDT implies the ecological modernization of big industrial and agricultural productions… It also helps economic stimulation in these enterprises, such as fines for those who violate existing laws or lower taxes for those who follow them," Begak said.

Sergei Talnishnikh, deputy head of the city's Industrial Policy and Innovations Committee, said the city government supports the ecological initiatives of local companies and is ready to provide certain stimuli from the city authorities, such as the subsidizing of some costs for providing ecology audits and production modernization, as well as consultation support. Enditem