There is a sound that we hear from the apartment every day, at least once, and I find it depressing. It is the sound of bottles tumbling and smashing as they are tipped from the bins into the disposal truck. The trouble is they are not seperate, but part of the general rubbish that is carried away daily.

I take pride in my recycling habits back home in Yorkshire. The regular (too regular!) trips to the bottle bank are a happy duty. Besides, don't you just love hurling the wine bottles into the containers and listening to them smash and tinkle

Two or three large, roll top bins service about 400 apartments here, and they are emptied regularly. They go to landfill:

Russia has lots of land and much of it has large holes therein. The problem faced at the moment is that the landfill sites near Moscow are filling up rapidly (22 million tons per year) and the cost of transportation to distant sites starts to hurt.

There are aluminium can recycling machines around the city, which give 1 rouble for three cans approximately. It is mostly the homeless who use these.

There is not a recycling culture here. In Britain we were educated, over a number of years, driven by political will and economic nessessity. The same could happen here. Apparently there are some domestic recycling schemes but they don't work because the users have not been educated in their proper use (source: Moscow News).
Legislation is in place to restrict wholesale dumping by industry and metal/paper recycling is done on a large scale.
There could be a good business opportunity for someone to take advantage of the potential in domestic recycling.

There is an army of street cleaners (doubling as snow clearers in the winter) and they do a splendid job. For tidiness Moscow compares well with many a British city.

In Soviet times bottles and jars were re-used but this has gone the way of the Soviet Union itself. I remember taking my empty Ben Shaws lemonade bottles back and getting a sixpence. If they did this now with wine bottles I'd be quids in.

Do svedanya,

Graham