Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

The issue of hazardous industrial wastes holds an important place among the problems of environmental protection in the Soviet Union. In the relationship between society and nature, industrial wastes possess two qualities; they are a raw material of a sufficient quantity to be reused in production and, at the same time, they are a powerful pollutant of the environment. Thus, the problem of industrial wastes is socially significant for both its economic and ecological dimensions. Whether priority is given to the interests of ecology or to those of economy, the resolution of the problem is determined by a number of real conditions: the state of the environment, the supply of raw materials for production, the opportunities for reuse of materials, and various other conditions and factors. A rational approach to the problem of industrial waste presupposes an integrated economic and ecological solution. To ignore this supposition in a society with a highly developed economy would generate enormous losses for both the economy and the environment.

Figures show that only about 1% to 1.5% of the total amount of natural substances involved in production are in the final product; the remaining 98.5 % to 99 % represent production "wastes." It is this unutilized part of the substance that forms the "weight" on nature. Approximately five billion tons of various wastes accumulate annually in the Soviet Union. Of the total wastes produced at nonferrous metallurgy enterprises, the chemical industry and other branches in the Soviet Union, from ten to twenty per cent of the wastes have toxic properties. Disposal of these wastes requires large land areas. According to available data, wastes occupy more than four million hectares of agricultural land within the Soviet Union.

The environment may be protected from pollution by hazardous industrial wastes through the successful promotion of three activities: the integrated use of natural resources and industrial wastes as secondary raw materials; the ecologically safe disposal of hazardous industrial wastes; and the cleaning up of existing dumps containing hazardous industrial wastes.

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