Communities can assess the debris amount by the unified method
It became easier for territorial communities to assess the amount and manage debris generated by war-related destruction. Experts from the ReThink public organization, a member of the Ukraine Support Team coalition, have developed Methodological Guidelines for accounting the volume of debris from destruction. These guidelines enable quick preliminary assessments of the amount of debris generated at the sites of destroyed residential buildings, educational institutions, and medical facilities. This tool will aid in planning expenses for demolition and logistics, as well as the placement of recycling facilities. More than 500 representatives of territorial communities in Ukraine have already been trained to use it.
Why is it important to count debris?
According to official data, there are more than 600 thousand tons of debris in Ukraine. However, experts estimate this figure to be significantly underestimated, as it only accounts for the debris transported to temporary storage sites or landfills. That is, the official statistics mostly do not consider the debris amount from buildings that remain undemolished, as there was no methodology for estimating debris at the sites of their formation. In addition, the amount of debris is not recorded in areas of active hostilities and temporarily occupied territories.
“To solve the problem, we first need to understand its scale. Our Methodological Recommendations for estimating the debris amount using the calculation method will help communities assess the amount of debris generated as a result of the demolition of a building and plan the necessary infrastructure for demolition, temporary storage, and recycling of this debris. Only by having accurate statistics – where exactly and how much debris we have, can we attract investors in recycling. The country cannot cope with this problem on its own,” says Olena Koltyk, head of the UST coalition and co-founder of ReThink.
How does the methodology work?
The Methodological Recommendations allow to estimate both the total amount of debris generated from the demolition of a building, as well as by components (such as concrete, bricks, wood, metal, and others) using the calculation method. According to ReThink expert Ihor Satin, after studying international experience, the team settled on the Japanese approach to accounting for debris from natural disasters and adapted it to Ukrainian realities:
“We cannot simply take the methodology of another country and apply it in Ukraine, as we live in different climatic conditions and use different materials and their quantities in construction. Accordingly, we have to derive our own calculated figures. More than 70% of Ukraine’s housing stock was built during Soviet times, in the 1950-1990s, so we analyzed projects from those times as well as modern ones to build an appropriate methodological foundation.”
The approach is based on deriving debris generation rates per square meter depending on the type of building. This way, communities can get a calculated amount of debris from demolitions by knowing only the building or demolition area and the type of building (for high-rise buildings). In addition, the methodology can be used to determine the estimated amount of asbestos-containing and related debris (related are the materials and items that were inside or near the object at the time of damage or demolition).
What were the communities taught?
Throughout June, the ReThink team held a series of offline and online workshops where they taught local government representatives and other stakeholders the basic principles of managing debris and assessing their amounts using the Methodological Recommendations. More than 500 people participated in these workshops.
During the online workshop, Deputy Minister for Communities, Territories, and Infrastructure Development Nataliia Kozlovska noted that the approach could be useful for communities in particular to determine the necessary quantity and capacity of equipment, areas for temporary storage, necessary funding, etc.
“We believe that the approaches proposed in the Methodological Recommendations can serve as a tool for preliminary and approximate express assessment of the volume of debris from demolitions. This will allow communities to initially determine the economic need for managing debris from demolitions.”
National aspect
On a national scale, when actual data on the volumes of generated debris is absent, the Methodological Recommendations will promote the implementation of circular economy principles and the establishment of the recycling industry. Finding ways to reuse debris from demolitions is important for Ukraine, noted Ukrainian MP Olena Shuliak during the online workshop. The “green course” is part of Ukraine’s commitments to the EU under the Ukraine Facility Plan.
“The EU is ready to support modern waste management infrastructure to create value-added chains and ensure recycling and reuse. Today, we see in the Netherlands that more than 90% of construction debris can be reused. I am confident that we can set similar goals for ourselves: what we need to do now to ensure that this recycling percentage is also maximized for our country.”
The Methodological Recommendations developed by ReThink experts could also become the foundation for working with construction and demolition debris in the future when the norms for using this type of debris in new construction products become mandatory in Ukraine, as in EU countries, said MP Oleh Bondarenko:
“Demolition debris is not an object for pollution or burial in landfills. It is a raw material. I would urge the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Ministry of Environment to quickly adopt these methodologies for their implementation in legislation, for their realization and practical application in recycling facilities.”
To simplify the practical use of the Methodological Recommendations, in a partnership with GlobalLogic Ukraine company the team developed an online calculator that will speed up the process of calculating the amount of debris by their components. The full version of the Methodological Recommendations and the online calculator can be found on the Ukraine Support Team coalition website.
Project “Rethink: Recommendations for Debris Management on the Frontlines” is a part of the Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative, implemented with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
