Kyrgyzstan

Small villages have no waste disposal sites, so people burn plastic bags, tires and plastic things near their homes and breathe in this air. The smoke settle on the fields where they grow their crops and then eat them. Furan does not disappear! They are called persistent organic pollutants because they won’t degrade in 40 years. Once they enter a human’s body, they stay inside until the human dies.

Kyrgyzstan still has no culture of discarding batteries at drop-off stations. Once it gets into a landfill, weather factors do their job and release hazardous chemical elements, they will still inhale the contaminated air.

They lack of infrastructure and relevant laws.

A few years ago, international donors launched a project in Bishkek, where the specialists of Kyrgyzstan developed a mechanism of disposal of mercury-containing electronic waste from medical facilities. They constructed a storage on the base of family medicine centre, where they stored fluorescent lamps safely and then transported them to Kadamzhai Integrated Works. They were disposed of there. According to epidemiologist Aleksey Kravtsov, analysts calculated the profitability of this enterprise. However, their recommendations were ignored.Hence the market is small and the market volume is small, they cannot work alone as it is unprofitable and the state does not support them at all. The government and deputies are in no hurry to save environment in their country.

However, Kyrgyzstan workshop pushes forward regional actions on E-waste- Government, civil society, and international organisations exchange best practices and highlight shared challenges on E-waste in eastern Europe and central Asia. The workshop revealed specific challenges associated with a lack of specific legislation on e-waste, the application of the principle of extended producer responsibility, and the lack of efficient systems for collection, repair and recycling operations of e-wastes.