Environment

In the Aral basin there are some gas and oil processing enterprises, ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy plants, chemical and machine-building enterprises. All these entities contribute to polluting the environment through releasing processed water, accumulating refuse tips and air pollution which returns to the earth with precipitations.

In Uzbekistan annual volume of industrial released wastes counts 300 mln cubic meters, 10% of them are directly into reservoirs without any previous treatment. Annually mining and smelting enterprises accumulate more than 25 billion tones of industrial wastes, most of them are toxic wastes form ferrous metallurgy industry. Domestic wastes are also dangerous containing toxic elements such as mercury, cadmium, etc. Often domestic wastes are collected together with the industrial ones.