Waste Management and Circular Economy in the Public Discourse in Russia

The waste management system, badly organized in Russia, finally came to the critical point with wide public protests. While EU develops its New Waste Framework Directive, working on extended producer responsibility and waste prevention activity, Russia making faked system of new waste taxation without changing of core waste treatment institutions. While EU countries create waste prevention programs using power of crowdsourcing, the Russian population was set aside from the discussion about planned transformations. Development of circular and sharing economy as a way of waste prevention and reduction is hardly discussed in Russia. Russians have a lot of spontaneous practices of resources savings, when they use Internet platforms to organize different activity to reduce, reuse and recycle municipal waste, but there is no legislative support or State investments in such kind of projects. Civil society in Russia is again ahead of its state in that field. The article makes a contribution to analyze the public discourse about significance of Circular and Sharing economy methods in the field of Municipal Waste management sphere in Russia.