Transiting the Waste Management System in the Moscow Agglomeration to a Circular Economy

Moscow and the region are faced with a serious problem of the "garbage crisis". There are not enough landfill sites, it is expensive to transport garbage to other areas, and some of them refuse to accept waste at all. The government decided to change the approach to the disposal of municipal solid waste. Serious work is currently underway to create a new waste management system in Moscow and the region. The work aims to collect a model based on the best practices of leading countries in waste management, which will be accepted as ideal. Comparing it with the Russian system, find the weaknesses of the second one and give recommendations for improvement. For this, the key features in waste management of the leading countries, unique solutions, pricing policy for services, flows and processes taking place in systems will be studied. The methods used in the work are: descriptive analysis, comparative analysis, synthesis and modeling. Information for analysis was rummaged from open sources: newspapers, magazines, research consulting agencies and databases. The key tasks of the work are: to study and systematize the basic principles of the circular economy, identify criteria for evaluating systems, systematize and describe information on waste management systems, compare systems, synthesize a reference system that includes best practices, compare tariffs, compare the reference system with the Russian and identify weaknesses, make recommendations for improving the system. In the course of the work, a reference system for waste management was built, the key shortcomings of the Russian system in organization, financing and strategy were highlighted: the lack of full-fledged management of hazardous waste, the lack of a sorting incentive system, a high financial and organizational burden on the regional operator, the rate on waste incineration. After identification of problems, recommendations were made aimed at improving the system for handling solid household waste in Moscow and the region.