Construction materials and household items containing asbestos are banned in the European Union and other self-proclaimed rich and developed countries, but are being produced and used in full swing in Russia and China, India and Africa. In Latvia, the last legal asbestos slate roof was installed in 2010. Since then, such roofs, as well as all other building elements and household items containing asbestos, must be replaced with asbestos-free products. Products with asbestos are declared hazardous waste, which can be legally disposed of for an increased fee. The fees are so high that many owners of asbestos roofs and other asbestos property have no choice but to dispose of the asbestos illegally and hope that they will not be penalized either because they will not be caught or because they are too obviously poor to they would be subject to exorbitant fines. It must also be recognized that it is difficult to see the damage caused by asbestos at the household level. For example, “who would have thought that he was diagnosed with a tumor in his lungs today because exactly 20 years ago, on May 8, 2004, he helped his neighbor tear down a slate roof?” Ivars Vanadziņš, director of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Environmental Health of Riga Stradiņš University, vouched for the connection of such events on behalf of medicine. Jānis Rozītis, director of the World Wide Fund for Nature, was worried that animals and plants suffer even more than people from environmental contamination with asbestos. But people still find it difficult to divert money from more obvious needs in order to pay, and pay, and pay again for mystical practices to overcome the evil effects of asbestos.
Logical, but still funny
Latvia’s Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development (VARAM) has come up with an offer to hand over asbestos slate free of charge to poor and low-income households. On the one hand, this method of providing assistance is completely logical, because the poor will certainly not be able to pay for the removal of asbestos (asbestos embedded in roofing materials, etc.) or the fine for polluting nature with asbestos. But on the other hand, the offer is just as logical as it is funny. This means that the officially poor households have to spend thousands or even tens of thousands of money over the next few months to replace the roof coverings on their homes already this month. They can’t give the old roof covering during the state charity promotion and live without a roof covering for years while they save money for a new roof or wait for the next state charity to install a new roof.
ENCOURAGED, SCARED, EXPLAINED. The Minister of Environmental Protection and Regional Development Inga Bērziņa (center) talked about the damage caused by asbestos and state offers to get rid of asbestos. To her right is the director of the Department of Environmental Protection Rudīte Vesere (who also serves as the deputy state secretary of the ministry) and the deputy general director of the State Environmental Service for strategic development and control Laura Anteina, and to the left – the director of the Occupational Safety and Environmental Health Institute of Riga Stradiņš University Ivars Vanadziņš and Director of the World Wildlife Fund, Jānis Rozītis / Arnis Kluinis
How to apply for help
Application for removable asbestos materials should be made this month (May) and then wait for removal in June or July. Application is possible for digitally advanced needy people who are able to navigate the VARAM website. The most direct entrance to the required section of the website can be found under the heading “Poor and low-income households can hand over asbestos-containing slate for free”. There you will find an application form with instructions for filling it in. The poor who have already provided an electronic signature can send the application to VARAM electronically, while the others must print out the form and fill it out. and must be sent to VARAM by post or brought in person.
Based on the information on the form, we MAY be able to verify (but do not guarantee that we will) whether the indigent applicant owns any property that may contain asbestos materials. It should not be the case that asbestos will be handed over on behalf of the poor by the rich enough to whom the state has not given such an opportunity at all.
From one household, no less than 200 kg, or approximately 10 sheets of slate, and no more than three tons, or 150 sheets of asbestos slate in the usual size since Soviet times, will be allowed for free. Perhaps roofs with asbestos slate in other formats have been preserved somewhere.
A little try is better than no try
Let’s believe that the state charity will still make sense for two reasons.
First, the state charity is microscopic, as it is limited to a total funding of 350,000 euros. It is possible to acquire such a small amount of money by handing over the asbestos slate, which was removed from the roof a long time ago and simply piled on the curb due to ignorance or unwillingness to start something with it. Even poor or low-income officially recognized households may have such a collection of waste, which would sooner or later turn into the terribly dangerous asbestos dust without the state’s intervention.
Secondly, the charity action could provide starting materials for calculations of how much the legal disposal of asbestos really costs, what is the demand for it and what is the real capacity of asbestos waste disposal sites. Currently, there is so little data that even at the introductory event of charity campaigns, for which all available data must be collected and organized, Rudīte Vesere, director of the Environmental Protection Department of VARAM, did not undertake to answer the question of how much asbestos slate will be collected with the allocated money.
After joining the EU, the country of Latvia has rewritten in its laws both the ban on using asbestos materials and the obligation to collect, transport and dispose of already used materials as hazardous waste, but it remains unclear how these legal norms are fulfilled. Only now has there been a rush to submit a request to the EU to pay for the charity project described here. The petition had to include figures, starting with the rounding of the amount of asbestos material to one million tonnes. By naming this quantity, the Minister of Environmental Protection and Regional Development Inga Bērziņa started the promotion of asbestos transfer.
Costs are scary and confusing
If the amount of asbestos materials is even approximately one million tons, then their legal removal and storage at current prices could be around 200 million euros after calculating 200 euros per ton. Such costs arise from three main components. The first – waste storage tariff from 100 euros per ton upwards. Neither R. Vesere nor Laura Anteina, Deputy Director General of the State Environmental Service for Strategic Development and Control, could say anything more precise. The second is the removal of roof coverings and other structures, for which companies providing such services charge 5-15 euros per square meter. The third – transporting the materials to one of the 18 such waste acceptance points, which in some cases can mean almost 100 km of road with corresponding costs.
It is comforting that there is no order to collect asbestos materials this year, so it is not necessary to immediately find 200 million euros for asbestos collection, nor the same and more million euros for laying new roofs. However, extending the collection of asbestos for decades also means extending the costs of this measure to a nominal value, which we can only fantasize about today, as well as the name of the money that people in the territory of present-day Latvia will use decades from now.
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