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Today Greenpeace activists marked with toxic danger signs several illegal waste water discharges into Neva river. All pipes marked belong to the city water treatment monopoly — State Unitary Enterprise «Vodokanal of St. Petersburg».

Environmentalists from the local branch of Greenpeace spoke out on Thursday about their campaigning to stop the construction of solid waste processing facilities in St. Petersburg. The organization argues that the technology used at the plants will severely damage the environment by contributing to air pollution.

Late last month, Mayor Yury Luzhkov quietly signed a decree ordering the construction of six new incinerators inside the city limits before 2012. Together with the four existing facilities, they will burn over 3 million tons of garbage per year, operating in every district of the city except the center. The plan is estimated to cost 60 billion rubles, or $2.5 billion, and it will place huge smokestacks near some of Moscow's greenest areas.

For many years, technology has contributed hugely to reducing or removing many practices that consume our planet’s resources: e-mail saves paper, which reduces demand on forests ; while videoconferencing cuts down the CO2 generated by flying around the world. It may be considered “cool” to be so mobile and digitalised, but examine these benefits more closely and a different, less eco-friendly reality becomes apparent.

Russia’s Security Council has met to decide how to streamline laws to combat environmental harm. Years of neglect and a growing economy have aggravated environmental threats, but now Russian officials want to encourage business to cut waste. Despite signing the Kyoto protocol, Russia is still home to some of the most polluted sites on Earth.

Customers can post their old phones to Mobile Fun Limited and for a small fee (approx. GBP20GBP) the old phones will be taken and buried in Russia, in the middle of KMA (Kursk Magnetic Anomaly).

Greenpeace volunteers cleaned up part of the oil spill along the Azov Sea shore last weekend. More than 20 kilometers of the coastline here are still polluted with oil. However, the clean-up operation here yet has not even been started.

Reports of soaring oil prices nearing $100 per barrel were recently countered with grotesque images of seabirds lying on the seashore drenched in fuel oil, unable to move let alone fly. These most visible victims of the November 11 oil spill in the narrow Kerch Strait, which links the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, became vivid symbols of negligence triggered by the increasing gains from exporting the “black gold.”

ScanEx Center received and processed Radarsat-1 satellite imagery of the wreck site in the Kerch Strait where on November 11 stormy wind (up to 32 m/sec) and sea disturbance (6-7 points, 5 meter high waves) caused four vessels (dry-cargo ships Volnogorsk, Nakhichevan, Kovel, Khach Izmail (Georgia)) to sink; six vessels (dry-cargo ships Vera Voloshinskaya (Ukraine), Ziya Kos (Turkey), Kapitan Izmail (Turkey), barges Dika, Dimetra and floating crane Sevastopolets) to break adrift and take the bottom; two tankers (Volgoneft-139 and Volgoneft-123) to damage.

Foreign visitors to Moscow are often impressed by the armies of street cleaners and garbage collectors that toil year round to keep the roads and sidewalks of the city scrubbed and free of leaves and litter. But what remains a mystery to visitors, and many Muscovites alike, is what happens to the waste once it is removed.

So far there has been only one solution to dealing with Moscow's waste: transport it to regions outside the city and dump it into vast landfill sites. But recent figures suggest that this solution will not work for much longer.

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the world’s second largest radiation accident, at Mayak in the Southern Urals, Greenpeace Russia has released a special report about the ongoing impacts of the Mayak tragedy. On the anniversary itself, Greenpeace will join local people in a protest rally in the nearby city of Chelyabinsk, to call for the relocation of those still living in contaminated areas and an end to Russia’s plans to import and reprocess even more foreign nuclear waste at the Mayak site.

Norilsk Nickel “distorted” figures on the amount of waste it dumped into rivers at its main site and may be fined, the Natural Resources Ministry said in a statement Thursday.

Today Greenpeace Russia and WWF Russia met with the delegation of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) headed by Mr. Gilbert Felli, Olympic Games Executive Director. The IOC delegation arrived in Moscow yesterday to discuss with the Russian authorities the master-plan of preparing Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.

Nord Stream, the company in charge of the new gas pipeline linking Russia with Western Europe, has told Russia Today its decision to re-route the pipeline does not, as Poland insists, require new environmental checks.

Governor Valentina Matviyenko sent a representative to join environmental group Greenpeace on a tour of the most polluted areas of the city’s waterways on Monday because she was unable to attend in person due to other commitments, Fontanka.ru reported.