ArmInfo. Today Yerevan hosted a "round table" within the framework of the EU "Common Efforts to Protect the Environment of the Black Sea Basin Countries" program. The conference was attended by representatives of Armenia, Georgia, Moldova.
The program implemented as part of the cross-border cooperation of the Eastern Neighborhood countries was approved in 2021 and runs until 2027. It aims to improve the well-being of people in the Black Sea Basin region through sustainable growth and joint environmental protection.
Representatives of various non-governmental organizations shared their experience and tools for the implementation of environmental programs at the conference. The Armenian participants of the program emphasized the implementation of measures aimed at the ecological preservation of water resources and the preservation of the ecological cleanliness of the Lake Sanaa basin. The need to strengthen measures for the treatment of wastewater and lake shores from solid waste was discussed.
A well-known expert on water resources, Knarik Hovhannisyan, noted the urgent need to create a new cadastre of water resources in Armenia in order to have a correct idea of how much water is in the country. According to her, global warming leads to a decrease in water resources and the statistical figure of the formation of water resources in Armenia in the amount of 8 billion cubic meters per year is overestimated and does not correspond to reality. According to her, today we can talk about an indicator of 7.2 billion cubic meters.
The "round table" also discussed the need to establish a so-called solid waste recycling process and, first of all, a plastic recycling process. In this vein, the experience of the "Urban" program in the Armenian city of Kapan was presented, where in 2018 a project was launched to process plastic and produce building materials from them, such as plastic slate and street curbs, obtained from sand with melting plastic sticking it together. These building materials are already widely used in municipal construction sites. The program budget amounted to about 750 thousand euros, of which 510 thousand were provided by the EU, the rest were provided by the government of Armenia and the municipality of Kapan. It was mentioned at the conference that the garbage sorting policy in Armenia has not become stable yet. According to the OSCE, the main water pollutants in Armenia are plastic containers, bottles and bags. About 5,000 tons of plastic waste accumulate in Armenia every year, and the country annually imports more than 600 tons of plastic bags and produces more than 200 tons of this environmentally hazardous product.