A town hall meeting on “Looking for Ways of the Further Use of the Landfill in the Village of Korzhi” was held in the town of Baryshivka on June 30th.
The event was organized by the Agency for Legislative Initiatives in cooperation with the Interns’ League within the Model District project under the aegis of USAID RADA Program: Responsible Accountable Democratic Assembly on the initiative of MP Pavlo Rizanenko.
In his opening speech, MP Pavlo Rizanenko emphasized the urgency and importance of finding a consensus concerning the further use of the landfill. He encouraged representatives of the communities of the villages of Berezan, Baryshivka, and Korzhi, as well as representatives of local self-government bodies, to discuss the issue in detail in order to break the impasse arising out of one of the most urgent problems of the region.
Oleksandr Zaslavskyi, Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Agency for Legislative Initiatives, familiarized the participants with the methodology of the event, giving examples of the application of the Town Hall Meetings format abroad and in Ukraine.
The expert of the event, Valeriy Mykhailenko, Associate Professor of the Department of Physical Geography and Geo-Ecology of T. Shevchenko National University, Candidate of Chemical Sciences, spoke about the modern scientific methods of landfill management and shared the relevant experience of the Baltic countries and Scandinavia in order to prepare the participants for discussion of the scenarios.
More than 50 participants spent hours discussing different options concerning the future landfill management from setting a sorting line to building a waste recycling plant.
Policy option 1 (to retain the status quo) proved unacceptable for both community representatives and local deputies. Therefore, they together decided to skip this alternative. Eventually, most of the participants voted for policy option 3, which implies the construction of a mini-processing plant funded by an investor.
Photo credit: Oleksandr Kovalenko
At the end of the event, representatives of the investor, who attended the event, made a presentation of concrete projects that can be fulfilled in the landfill of the village of Korzhi.
