At the end of a busy working day, the head of the Belarusian environmental protection agency Andrei Khudyk held talks with the Director General of the State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom Alexei Likhachev on the sidelines of the XIII International Forum “ATOMEXPO-2024”.
The parties discussed a wide range of areas of bilateral cooperation in the field of environmental protection and rational use of natural resources, and identified the most promising projects in terms of implementation, including studying the possibility of organizing environmentally safe disposal of waste, including hazardous waste.
The head of the environmental protection agency and the Director General of Rosatom exchanged views on improving the efficiency of implementing the international commitments of the Republic of Belarus and the Russian Federation under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. In particular, Minister Andrei Khudyk shared his experience in implementing the fourth National Plan for the Implementation of the Commitments of the Republic of Belarus to Implement the Provisions of the Stockholm Convention. The parties discussed the progress in completing work to eliminate accumulated warehouses of obsolete pesticides in the Republic of Belarus. Thus, during the implementation of one of the international technical assistance projects, PCB-containing equipment from more than 190 owners was destroyed, a total of more than 2 thousand tons of POP-containing waste was removed from the Republic of Belarus and destroyed, and work is underway to prepare for the commissioning of a facility for the environmentally safe destruction of persistent organic pollutants and other hazardous waste.
At the end of the negotiations, the Belarusian and Russian parties agreed to continue bilateral cooperation in the field of waste management, including hazardous waste.
Cooperation between the Ministry of Natural Resources and the State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom is carried out on the basis of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection of the Republic of Belarus and the State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom (Russian Federation) 2023.
