Fleet Dismantling and Maritime Cleanup

From 1990, for ten years, Dr Startsev was Director General of the specialized environmental enterprise CJSC (joint venture) Interferrum-Metall, a ship recycling yard within the Vtorchermet production association and the only industrial enterprise of its kind in North-West Russia. The yard specialized in the recycling of hazardous military and industrial waste and took part in the state defence procurement programme for the recycling of decommissioned weapons and military equipment: warships, submarines, vessels and floating craft, and land military vehicles.

A small workforce of 65 people had equipment rare in Russia, including a Lindemann (Germany) shear press of 2,500 tonnes-force.

By June 1999 the yard had recycled 114 ships and vessels, 12 of them sunken ones raised by the yard itself. The most complex were 32 warships: a cruiser of more than 14,000 tonnes displacement and 220 m in length, 14 Whiskey- and Foxtrot-class diesel submarines and a floating barracks in distress. In addition, more than 1,000 artillery mounts, armoured vehicles and air-defence missile systems were cut up for scrap.

Over ten years the yard carried out a large volume of environmental work, clearing the eastern Gulf of Finland and adjoining waterways of decommissioned floating objects, including sunken ones. The total dock weight of the vessels recycled was about 70,000 t.

In May–June 1998 the yard averted an environmental disaster near Primorsk. The decommissioned naval floating barracks Tosna was in distress, with 100 t of fuel oil and diesel in its tanks; had it sunk, the oil would have spilled into the Gulf near the Finnish coast. At its own risk the yard towed the barracks to its shop and recycled it.