To the south of Yerevan, just before the tourist sites of Erebuni Fortress and the majestic Khor Virap monastery, a trash can overflows with plastic bags and food waste. The country’s main landfill, Nubarashen, isn’t far from here, but it’s been six days since the trash has been removed. Bystanders on their way to the nearby Yerevan mall don’t seem to pay much attention to the prickly smell of waste.

Nevertheless, city residents are paying increasing attention to the crisis in Yerevan’s waste collection services. According to 2017 data from Armenia’s National Statistics Service, one in five people are dissatisfied with waste collection services in the country. Since September 2018, the Armenian capital’s waste management service has been in turmoil - largely following mismanagement by service provider Sanitek Armenia and the municipality of Yerevan, as well as the previous government’s privatisation of the country’s principal landfill. And this standoff between the company and the city authorities has hammered home the lack of effective regulation, such as a national-level authority to monitor waste management and ensure good service is provided.

A few days after I visited the Nubarashen landfill last month, the Yerevan city administration sued Sanitek for not removing waste for six consecutive days, and to withdraw from its contract with the company. Then, on 3 October, city mayor Hayk Marutyan announced he was “entirely and unilaterally” terminating the contract with Sanitek in a public address.

On 10 October, Sanitek International released a statement in which it claimed that “the overriding objective of the city authorities was to damage [Sanitek's] activities by all possible means”, and that the Armenian state “is unable to ensure the exercise of the right to a fair trial by a foreign investor.”

Worst case scenario

“We don't want to sanction the company, we want a clean city,” Gayane Ter-Astvatsatryan tells me. Together with a group of volunteers, Gayane runs a Facebook community devoted to waste mismanagement in Yerevan. She believes that paying a monthly tax of $0.50 per person for waste management is “too much compared to the service provided.”

“The solution is to have another company instead of only Sanitek,” Ter-Astvatsatryan says. “Maybe two or three companies, if one cannot do the job alone.”

Sanitek’s waste monopoly could be considered a legacy of Armenia’s old regime, which was kicked out of power by a street protest movement led by now Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan - the 2018 “Velvet Revolution”. Five years ago, the municipality of Yerevan issued a tender to manage waste collection in all 12 of the city’s districts - a public offer to manage Yerevan’s trash. While former Yerevan mayor Taron Margaryan is now being investigated in an anti-corruption probe, the 2014 tender for individual, industrial as well as private business waste continued - until October 2019.

In December 2014, private Beirut-based company Sanitek International obtained a ten-year monopoly on waste collection and sanitary cleaning for the entirety of Yerevan. Sanitek had been set up four years earlier, and had previously managed local waste management projects in Lebanon, Turkey and Algeria.