May 23, 2019

Why "green" initiatives of Russian lawmakers harm the environment

located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

Sugar sticks, plastic dishes and plastic bags must be banned in Russia, federal parliament's lawmaker Vasili Vlasov proposed on Thursday. Providing sugar sticks along with hot drinks provokes customers to consume the harmful substance, while the use of plastic bags harms the environment, he said.

Despite the alleged ecologically-friendly intentions behind the statement, the initiative is flawed, director of the Russian Institute for Nature Andrei Peshkov says. "Vlasov's proposal has been senseless. Plastic bags and cups are not harmful by themselves. The way our citizens handle them is. They threw used bags and cups around. But the MP offers to cure headaches with a guillotine", he says. Peshkov points out that if the plastic bags and cups will be substituted with the comparable volumes of paper bags and cups, it will result in massive deforestation and thus harm the environment even more.

He stresses that paper used for production of dishes and bags comes from different sources: either from natural pulp or from recycled materials. "The lawmakers will be better off banning the use of pulp paper bags and to make it economically unprofitable to use non-biodegradable plastic. Still, it looks like Russian lobbyists don't let them do so.

Why, otherwise, Russian lawmakers invent the bills which would result in the outcome opposite to the intended ones?" he says. Similarly, the experts find Vlasov's idea to ban sugar sticks senseless. An expert in the Institute of Agrarian Market, Eugeny Ivanov, doesn't understand how one can "provoke" a customer to use sugar if he or she doesn't like sweet drinks. "Sugar sticks make up less than one or two percent of the national sugar consumption which amounts to six million tons. So banning that tiny segment will make no difference", he says.

According to Ivanov, vending coffee machines have been more harmful for people's health than sugar sticks because the customer has no choice in how much sugar to add into his or her drink. "Not all coffee machines have been equipped with sugar dosators. Even where they are installed, few customers use them", he says. Initiatives aimed to ban some foods have been mushrooming in Russia in recent years. They are disguised as health concerns but their actual purpose is to provoke the population's aversion to unaffordable foods and thus to deflate social tension.

In November 2018, the Head of the Public Health Council, Daria Khalturina, offered to ban processed meat products such as salami. She insisted that salami had been as harmful to health as tobacco.