ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- Flick through the political sections of Facebook, Instagram or Tik Tok in Kazakhstan, and chances are you will come across the latest clip of a clean-cut man venting about car-recycling fees.
That man is Sanzhar Boqaev, a former official, businessman, and currently the most famous activist in a movement called No To Recycling Fees (Nyetutilsboru).
But what are recycling fees, and why has a movement to scrap them gained so much traction in Kazakhstan?
The answer to the first question is simple.
Recycling fees exist in many countries to ensure that the cost of recycling an object at the end of its life is covered up front.
In the Netherlands, the fee charged by the nonprofit Auto Recycling Netherlands for cars arriving into the Dutch market for the first time is 20 euros ($22).
In Kazakhstan, it would be more than 60 times that cost for any imported car with a 1.5-liter engine and roughly 90 times that cost for imported cars with engines of between 2 and 3 liters. After that it gets even more expensive.
This system has underpinned an increase in the cost of vehicles more generally, which provides part of the answer to the second question.
Not that the authorities have been receptive to calls to do away with it.
On July 15, officials from Kazakhstan's Industry Ministry all but dismissed any chance of reductions to the de facto tax after a petition against the fees initiated by Boqaev surpassed 50,000 signatures and forced a public hearing on the topic.
Boqaev rejected an invitation to attend the public hearing, partly in protest of it being held "inside the oligarchs' gates" -- shorthand for the Hyundai Trans Kazakhstan assembly plant -- a direct beneficiary of the fees that help keep imports out of Kazakhstan's local car market.
But Boqaev and his group have pledged to continue their campaign against recycling fees, whatever final decision the government makes.
If small but regular and geographically diverse protests against the fees this year are any indication -- not to mention massive resonance on social media -- they still have large public support.
For Pure Air Or Pure Profits?
Ever since the recycling fee was introduced in 2016, the Kazakh authorities have come up with various reasons to try to justify the larger tabs that now impact vehicle buyers -- sometimes environmental, sometimes economic.
What they tend to skim over is that the leading beneficiary of the fees to begin with was the completely private company that collected them -- a government-anointed monopolist called Operator ROP, which was linked to Alia Nazarbaeva, youngest daughter of then-President Nursultan Nazarbaev.
Nevertheless, current leader Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev -- who publicly distanced himself from Nazarbaev and his family in the wake of unprecedented unrest in January 2022 -- has acknowledged the negative public perception of the recycling-fee collection. In his first extended address to the nation less than a week after the bloodshed that left more than 230 people dead, he ordered the end of Operator ROP's monopoly and a reduction of the fees, which are now collected by a state-owned company.
But crucially, he spoke against scrapping them fully and in favor of continuing to use them to support Kazakh factories dedicated to assembling cars and agricultural vehicles. The companies that run these plants are exempt from recycling fees and enjoy other forms of state support.
A compromise to suit everyone? Not really.
Despite the fees being slashed by half to their current level in the months that followed, they remain "unaffordable," according to the petition published on the government's recently created "petition website" in May.
"This has led to the destruction of competition and, as a consequence, to a sharp increase in prices for cars, agricultural machinery, and specialized equipment. In addition, prices for everything related to motor transport and mechanization have increased: freight transportation, mechanization and public transport services, food, consumer goods, housing costs, and much more," the petition reads.
With Nazarbaeva and her company now out of the picture, the biggest beneficiaries of the expensive recycling-fee system are the car-assembly plants, which have been allowed to corner the national market on cars and set prices well above those found in most countries.
This means so-called "oligarchs" like Andrei Lavrentyev, who heads the Allur industrial group, and Nurlan Smagulov, whose Astana Motors owns the Hyundai Trans Kazakhstan production facility where this week's public hearing took place.
According to the authorities, at least 20,000 people work assembling vehicles in Kazakhstan.
At the same time, both the Industry Ministry and the companies themselves have faced doubts about whether these factories are doing more than cobbling cars together largely from imported components.
Boqaev compounded skepticism over "localization" after Allur agreed to provide him a tour of one of its premises last month -- a decision the company is probably now regretting.
Part of the footage that Boqaev shot at Allur showed a welder at the tractor assembly plant repeatedly failing to fulfill a routine task.
For the million-plus viewers on Facebook and Instagram, the takeaway from the video was two-sided -- either the employee was doing a job that he had never done before, purely for show, or he was doing a job that he did regularly but poorly, potentially compromising vehicle safety.
Ghost Factories And Smear Campaigns
That isn't the first time that one of Boqaev's videos has blown up social media.
In October, the activist went to the effort of buying an old tractor and taking it to a supposed $11 million factory that the government had declared "launched" in late 2021 in the hope of seeing how it was recycled.
But workers on the site said that the factory had not yet recycled anything, and that the plant -- which contrary to state media reports appeared to be nowhere near finished -- would not be doing any recycling in the near future.
After failing to get his tractor recycled at yet another factory, Boqaev addressed an angry question to Toqaev: "Tell me, what are Kazakh citizens paying [recycling fees] for?"
Zhasyl Damu, the state company that took over Operator ROP's functions, admitted in a response at the time that the factories were inactive because "an act of commissioning the plant has not yet been signed" since ROP's assets had been seized by the state nearly two years prior.
The final call on whether to further reduce recycling fees rests with Industry Minister Kanat Sharlapaev, who did not attend the July 15 Almaty public hearing.
But nothing done at the event -- which was closed to the general public -- suggests the government will budge.
One by one, state officials and lawmakers lined up to explain reasons why the fees were necessary, while casting doubt on the veracity of the arguments made in Boqaev's petition.
Industry Ministry representative Adilbek Bekitbaev argued that "80 percent of the population in our country does not have a car. They have the right to live in a good environment and breathe clean air."
The official said that since 2022, when the sky-high fees were first reduced, more and more older and polluting cars had been imported into Kazakhstan.
Activists in the Nyetutilsboru group maintain that this is a manipulation of the truth.
They argue that the inflated cost of new vehicles -- a product both of the recycling fees and price-setting by the local auto industry -- has forced people to drive their cars into the ground rather than change them. If citizens want to buy cars they have to buy cars they can afford, which tend to be older.
Days before the public hearing, Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov gave full-throated backing to the idea that Kazakhstan can become an "automobile power," and praised the auto sector for expanding the number of production processes carried out in Kazakhstan.
But Kazakhstan, a country of around 20 million people, is surrounded by countries -- China, Russia, and even Uzbekistan -- that have more powerful and outward-facing automobile industries.
Optimistic official statements, meanwhile, have been accompanied by an extended bashing of Boqaev on pro-government Telegram channels.
The authors have some ammunition.
Prior to becoming an opponent of the system around 2019, Boqaev was part of it, serving in various roles in Almaty's city hall and, finally, as an adviser to another Nazarbaev daughter, Darigha Nazarbaeva.
One position that he quit in 2015 that is particularly unpopular in opposition circles was as head of the city's Internal Policy Department.
The department's mandate includes permissions for political demonstrations, which are invariably blocked.
In an interview with RFE/RL's Kazakh Service last year, Boqaev said he did not regret working for a "politically dependent body."
He admitted that he carried out his role like a "soldier" but that he had "received experience that the vast majority of citizens haven't received" by seeing the system from the inside.
