The All-Russian Scientific and Educational Conference with International Participation "Modern Technologies in Environmental Protection and Technosphere Safety-2026", organized by the Department of Engineering Ecology, has come to an end at KNRTU. The conference featured presentations by scientists from KNRTU and their colleagues from Russian universities (Barnaul, Belgorod, Vladivostok, Volgograd, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Moscow, Naberezhnye Chelny, Nizhnekamsk, Samara, St. Petersburg, Saratov, Taganrog, Ufa), the Industrial University of Viet Cong, as well as industrial partners — LLC TatGlavProgress, which acted as the general partner of the event, PJSC Kazanorgsintez, PJSC Tatneft.

The conference was devoted to discussing issues related to the protection of air and water environments, the recycling of production and consumption waste, the monitoring of environmental objects, and the search for solutions to environmental problems.

At the plenary session, the first speaker was Elena Popova, Deputy Head of the Volga-Kama Interregional Department of the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources Management, who presented her report on the activities of the Volga-Kama Interregional Department of Rosprirodnadzor. She spoke not only about the activities of her department, which now covers Tatarstan, Chuvashia, and Mari El, but also touched upon the topics of environmental education, eco-education, and volunteering. "Graduates of KNRTU successfully complete their internships and then work in our department," she emphasized. "Thank you very much for training your, or rather, our wonderful staff!"

According to Vladislav Dryakhlov, Acting Head of the Department of Engineering Ecology and the moderator of the meeting, this is no coincidence. KNRTU not only has a unique experience in training specialists in such important areas of ecology and technosphere safety as wastewater and natural water treatment, air protection, waste management and recovery, and environmental management and monitoring, but it also ensures the growth of its scientific and teaching staff. The department has achieved almost 100% degree completion, and this goal will be achieved in the near future.

The history of the Department of Engineering Ecology was told by its head in 2010-2025, Professor Ildar Shaikhiev. He recalled that environmental technological education began at the then KHTI named after S. M. Kirov back in 1971, when the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education of the RSFSR issued an order on May 19, 1971, establishing the training of engineers in the field of "Recycling of Secondary Industrial Materials" at our institute. At that time, this specialty was only available at two universities in the Russian Federation: the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology (now RCTU) and the Leningrad Institute of Pulp and Paper Industry (now VSTE). Consequently, the first graduation took place in 1976, making it a double anniversary. The first head of the R-836 course (recycling of secondary industrial materials) was a specialist in organophosphorus compounds, a student of G. Kh. Kamay, Sergey Fridland, who later became the head of the newly established department.

Over the years, KSTU's environmental engineering graduates have excelled both in academia and in industry and government agencies. Among them, for example, is Damir Shayakhmetov, First Secretary of the Tatar Regional Committee of the Komsomol, and if we talk about current staff, we can mention the name of Fayaz Shakirov, Head of the Volga-Kama Interregional Department of Rosprirodnadzor and Candidate of Technical Sciences. If we were to describe the lives of the department's distinguished students, we would need a whole book, as the department produced between sixty and 100 students each year. In order to present the full range of research areas of the Department of Industrial Engineering in detail, with references to the papers that have been defended and published, it will probably be necessary to publish a separate book. There are many research areas, and it will also be necessary to provide a list of universities with which we are conducting joint scientific and methodological work.

Today, representatives of these universities have arrived at the conference, as noted by the professor. Arkady Yaroshevsky, an associate professor and the oldest employee of the Department, gave a detailed presentation on the collaboration between KNRTU and the Department of Industrial Engineering with industry. He discussed both the achievements and the challenges in this area. The main areas of mutually beneficial work are personnel training, implementation of additional professional programs in accordance with the customer's requirements, and scientific and technical cooperation, including long-term projects. Contacts with the KNRTU Design Institute are gradually being established. According to Arkady Yaroshevsky, our university will eventually create an engineering center in the field of industrial ecology, which will be able to unite the efforts of scientific teams, departments, and the Design Institute in the development of new technologies, ensuring consistency and increasing the productivity of research, and shortening the path from idea to implementation.

Evgeny Bondarenko, Technical Director of TatGlavProgress LLC, presented the company's perspective on its needs and production specifics. These topics were also addressed by representatives of Kazanorgsintez PJSC and Tatneft.

A positive report was presented by Ruslan Allakhverdeyev, Deputy Head of the Central Territorial Department of the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of the Republic of Tatarstan, on the activities of the Ministry. As Vyacheslav Dryakhlov joked, referring to the in-depth analysis of regulatory issues in the reports by Elena Popova and Ruslan Allakhverdeyev: "We know that there is a regulatory ecology, and there are ecological laws that govern the lives of living organisms, and they differ from the laws of the state," which, of course, does not make compliance with the state's regulations any less mandatory.

The guests from Samara, including Andrey Vasilyev, Head of the Department of Technosphere Safety and Quality Management at Samara State Technical University, Director of the Scientific and Technical Center for Technosphere Safety and New Materials, and an expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Mikhail Penteshin, a postgraduate student at the department, and Gor Shushanyan, an engineer at the Scientific and Analytical Center for Industrial Ecology, discussed various aspects of technosphere safety.

The sectional work was held in building G. In total, 120 reports were submitted to the conference, which were reviewed in five sections.