Big stink erupts over landfills ringing Russia’s capital
KOLOMNA, Russia — Walking to a store in March, Olga Yevseyeva was hit by the familiar, noxious stench of rotten eggs wafting from the town landfill a few miles away. It was a moment that changed her life.
“This smell just made me explode with anger,” she recalled of that spring night in Kolomna, a town about 60 miles southeast of Moscow. “And I realized something had to be done, because you can’t just go on like this.”
Never politically active, Yevseyeva, 34, joined hundreds of other residents who stood in the middle of the road a few weeks later, blocking garbage trucks from delivering more of the waste to the landfill.