Officials claim that the air quality in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, has significantly improved over the last two years due to the ongoing renewal of the municipal transport fleet, switching residential heating from coal to natural gas, and extinguishing the sanitary landfill near Bishkek that had burned for decades.
Chyngyzbek Abdymalik Uulu, an atmospheric air specialist at the Kyrgyz Ministry of Natural Resources, Ecology, and Technical Supervision, told Birinchi Radio that the primary sources of air pollution in Bishkek were low-quality coal, exhaust gases from motor transport, and the burning of municipal solid waste at the city landfill.
The official says that, in large part, the air quality has improved due to the decreasing number of minibuses on Bishkek streets.
Over the past 30 years, “markhrutka” minibuses — mainly aged Mercedes minivans — have been the primary type of municipal transport in Bishkek, vastly surpassing in number the limited fleet of large buses and trolleybuses. Running on diesel, these old marshrutkas spew harmful gases into the atmosphere and congest city traffic, since they stop anywhere on demand.
Abdymalik Uulu said more than 3,000 minibuses ran in the capital until 2022. After their number was reduced over the last two years, diesel fuel consumption decreased by 100 tons daily.
The Bishkek municipality has now removed the minibuses from the central part of the city and replaced them with large buses running on liquefied natural gas.
In 2023, Bishkek purchased a thousand large buses from China, which have been arriving in the capital city in batches over the past year. Today, the municipal fleet has 1,200 buses. In addition, by the end of 2024, the city will receive 100 12-meter-long buses, and 120 electric buses will arrive in the second quarter of 2025.
Both officials and analysts agree that renewing the municipal transport fleet will improve the air quality in Bishkek.
Abdymalik Uulu added that gasification is another reason for the improved air quality. To date, about 20,000 households have been connected to natural gas networks, which has decreased coal burning by 58,000 tons. Also, he said, all of Bishkek’s 74 large boiler houses that used to burn large amounts of coal daily have now been converted to electricity and natural gas.
Finally, the Bishkek sanitary landfill, which burned for decades and released large volumes of harmful emissions, has been completely extinguished.
