Regulating Waste Management: National Experience and International Practice

Abstract

The article analyzes legal changes in the field of municipal solid waste management in Russia and considers situations that have already arisen and will arise in the future in connection with the need to qualify certain acts as offenses under the new legislation. In this regard, the authors of the article became the first to identify the problems relevant to many former Soviet republics. They have developed solutions that can be used by countries that experience similar difficulties. To reform the above-mentioned sphere, it is necessary to introduce new actors into the field of waste management and, accordingly, into the area of legal responsibility in case of non-fulfillment or improper fulfillment of their duties. The article examines the responsibility, rights and obligations of the parties to such relations. The authors have concluded that the legislator should clearly define possible violations and types of their punishment. The article also pays attention to such parties involved in waste management as "landowners". However, the list of possible violators cannot be denoted in such a way since not all owners of land plots with residential real estate are full-fledged owners of these plots. Some of them lease land plots or have limited property rights. As landowners, they should be recognized as parties to relations in the field of municipal solid waste management. One more issue which is especially relevant for the former Soviet republics is to determine an entity responsible for the collection and removal of waste from land plots, whose ownership is unclear. The article claims that responsibility for cleaning the territory of a land plot should be assigned to local authorities at the location of this contaminated land plot.