ReThink NGO, a member of the Ukraine Support Team coalition, held a series of workshops in Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Kherson regions on best practices in managing debris caused by Russia’s war against Ukraine, including a new method for estimating the amount of debris created by an attack.
“Until now, communities were required to centrally report the amount of debris created by an attack, but did not have a unified tool to estimate this amount,” says ReThink co-founder and UST coalition chairwoman Olena Koltyk.
“The majority of communities counted them “by eye”, or by the number of cars removed at best. In addition, many communities only account for what was already delivered to temporary storage sites, not including buildings awaiting demolition. Thus neither the state nor the communities themselves have correct data. The planning of processing infrastructure as well as attracting private business is impossible without reliable statistics. Application of our Methodological recommendations will help to understand the scale of the problem.”
ReThink’s experts developed this new approach following an analysis of a Japanese methodology, and a study of typical buildings in Ukraine. The new method will help to form more objective statistical data for logistics planning and for the placement of future processing facilities, and will simplify community reporting under Resolution No. 1073, which mandates this reporting requirement.
The approach contains calculation formulas and standards for waste generation per 1 sq.m. of the destruction, according to the type of building. Representatives of territorial communities can use this calculation method to estimate both the total amount of generated debris and its amount by components (concrete, bricks, wood, asbestos, associated waste, etc.), based on the area of the destroyed building (or its parts) and the type of building.
Due to numerous requests from those who could not join the offline workshops, as well as the high interest in the topic of representatives from other regions of Ukraine, the ReThink team has expanded the geography of the workshops and will hold an additional online event on June 27 at 14:00 on the Zoom platform. Details and registration are at the link.
Workshops were held within the framework of the project “Rethink: Recommendations for Debris Management on the Frontlines” as a part of the Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative, implemented with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
We sincerely thank our regional partners for their help in organizing events: the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, the Kherson Regional Military Administration and the Deputy Head of the Kherson RM Mykhailo Lemak, the Mykolaiv City Council and its’ Deputy Chairman Serhiy Korenev, the Regional Development Agency of the Odesa region, Mykolaiv Development Agency, Mykolaiv Regional Development Agency, Regional Development Agency “European Integration Office” of the Kherson region.
Debris accounting in Ukraine is currently complicated due to the lack of a mechanism for determining their volumes. This is evidenced by the results of the extensive community survey conducted by the ReThink NGO (a member of the Ukraine Support Team coalition), as part of the development of methodological recommendations for the debris management.
Estimates of the Central executive authorities regarding the amount of debris sometimes differ tens of thousands of times: from 600 thousand to 15 billion tons. To have a deeper understanding of the real situation in communities, as well as to assess their ability to correctly account the data, a survey was conducted on the debris generation, their amount, and the types of materials used in construction. Our experts analyzed the communities’ responses and used them to develop methodological recommendations for determining the estimated amount of debris.
According to the responses of 159 communities, 40.25% have information about the building area of damaged objects; 61.01% know the number of floors; 49.06% have information on the total area of damaged objects. The rest do not have such information or have it partially, did not fill in the columns, or expressed assumptions.
Thus, in the Chernihiv and Kherson regions, documentation was lost in some communities as a result of active hostilities.
Stipulated by Cabinet Resolution No. 1073, the official sites for the temporary storage of debris (STS) were created in less than a third of the communities that participated in the survey.
At the same time, 33.33% of communities noted that they have untransported to the STS debris. The vast majority of communities – 78.62% (125 out of 159) – did not sort debris by type of materials. Only 8.18% (13 out of 159 communities) noted that they recorded information on the volumes of debris generation by object (address).
During the survey, we received responses from 257 communities from 19 regions of Ukraine (17.87% of the total). Communities from Sumy, Donetsk, and Lviv regions took the most active part in the survey.
No answers were received from the communities of the Volyn, Zakarpattia, Kirovohrad, Luhansk, and Mykolaiv regions.
In conducting the research, our specialists used and analyzed the data provided by 61.87% (159) communities since the rest indicated that they did not have destruction caused by the war or their questionnaires did not have enough information for analysis.
The survey results confirmed the ReThink NGO hypothesis that the debris accounting in Ukraine is based on general assumptions and not on actual or forecast information; it is not always possible to obtain high-quality statistical information on the volume and morphology of the generated waste. It is due to the fact that the state obliged communities to report monthly on the amount and component composition of debris (by Cabinet Resolution No. 1073) but did not provide them with a tool for calculating the volume of such waste.
This survey was conducted from February 28 to March 11, 2024, with the assistance of the Ministry for Community, Territories, and Infrastructure Development of Ukraine by the method of self-filling the questionnaire by respondents.
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).
Kharkiv met us with continuous aerial alarms: the alert system in the center of the city, wounded by Russian attacks, almost does not subside. Thirty announcements in two days, the shortest pause between notifications in the application is about 20 seconds. It is not our first trip to the de-occupied regions. But the ballistics reach the city in 40 seconds. It is hard to ignore the “increased missile danger” message here.
“We are not afraid of the alerts here in Kharkiv. If a missile hits, it’s usually before the alert is announced,” locals laugh.
We came to Kharkiv to investigate the problem of debris management. For the third month, the ReThink NGO (a member of the Ukraine Support Team coalition) has been developing methodological recommendations for debris management. The experience differs depending on the region, which is why we work on the ground. Here, in Kharkiv, for example, the dismantling of destroyed buildings is just beginning.
Scale of destruction
According to city Mayor Ihor Terekhov, Kharkiv has suffered the most destruction among the cities controlled by Ukraine. Currently, the number of damaged and destroyed buildings in the city reaches 8,800. In the entire region, according to the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration, 48,900 such objects have been registered. This figure is indicative since it is unpossible to keep destruction records in active combat zones.
We start from the city center. The building of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration (RSA), damaged by the Russian Iskander missile in March 2022, is preserved. A construction crane stands in its backyard. Behind it are dilapidated old houses scattered on the ramified narrow streets. The scene looks as if the aggressor’s troops missed a dozen times before hitting RSA. The city conducts mostly operational work on clearing and securing the sites of attacks. A mass dismantling of destroyed buildings has not yet been carried out.
We are heading to Saltivka – the largest neighborhood of Kharkiv, where a third of the 1.5 million city population used to live before the full-scale invasion. During the defense of the regional center, the northern outskirts of Saltivka came under constant Russian artillery fire. Dozens of high-rise buildings without windows and with holes through them are covered with coal-black stains.
The first building is being dismantled here. It’s a sixteen-story building on 82 Natalia Uzhvii St. destroyed by Russian aerial bombs. According to the agreement with the contractor, the components of the debris must be sorted immediately at the construction site.
Later that day, at the field meeting of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Environmental Policy and Nature Management in Kharkiv, Deputy Minister for Communities, Territories, and Infrastructure Development Natalia Kozlovska summarizes:
“We see that there is a lack of primary sorting on the ground. At the expense of the budgets of different levels, we will not overcome this problem. Our goal is to create such a model that would be interesting for business.”
Debris management
The slope of the 45-meter hill of the reclaimed body of the old landfill offers views of the new Dergachy landfill. On the left is a complex for the processing of solid household waste and a complex that converts biogas into electricity, which is almost ready for operation. On the right is a site for temporary storage (STS) of debris.
We came here to inspect STS, together with an official delegation from Kyiv. Here are Members of Parliament, representatives of the Ministry for Restoration and the Ministry of Ecology as in two hours the meeting of the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada, dedicated to the management of solid waste and debris, starts.
At the STS, one can see piles of debris, which they are trying to sort by fractions. Waste collected during the clearing of hit sites and overhauls of high-rise buildings is brought here. Everything that is currently stored here should be further sorted. This debris includes both solid household and hazardous waste. The issues of storage and processing of dangerous waste remain open both for Kharkiv (where the implementation of a modern waste management system is at the final stage) and for the entire country.
“We expect the bulk of the debris when the dismantling process takes on a larger scale. We now have separate piles of concrete and wood. But in the dismantling process, we hope to have more deeply sorted components. We plan to install special equipment, including modern shredders provided by international partners at the temporary storage site,” – Director of Kharkiv Municipal Waste Management Company Yuriy Suyarko says.
During 2023, about 8,500 tons of waste were received there. Last year in spring, the company began grinding concrete with its own crushers. However, the obtained raw material could only be used for road filling since the fraction turned out to be too large. According to the Ministry for Restoration, based on the community reports, there are 3 official sites for temporary storage in the Kharkiv region, where 4,000 tons of debris are kept.
“Any solutions in the field of waste management are expensive. If we do not plan the logic of infrastructure placement, we may end up in a situation where we have spent a lot of resources, but not solved the problem,” the Chairwoman of the UST coalition Olena Koltyk says during her speech at the Committee meeting.
The question of introducing changes to the environmental protection and urban planning legislation of Ukraine, which would regulate the dismantling and storage of debris, as well as their further processing and use in new building materials, remains unresolved. According to the Chairman of the Committee, Member of Parliament Oleg Bondarenko, parliamentarians are ready to work on this.
FOR REFERENCE. According to the head of the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration Oleh Synegubov, the damage caused to the ecology of the region as a result of Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine as of the beginning of March 2024 amounts to 432 billion hryvnias.
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).
Experts and authorities are looking for opportunities to produce new construction products from recycled debris. A wide range of stakeholders met at the round table “Overcoming the consequences of war: determining the volume and debris management” on March 6 in Kyiv to discuss approaches to demolition waste management and ways to solve problems with it in the war-affected regions.
The issue of debris management is one of the priorities in the recovery process and requires coordination of efforts at all levels, government officials and Members of Parliament say. According to Deputy Minister of Community, Territories, and Infrastructure Development Natalia Kozlovska, at this stage, along with cleaning the territories from destruction, it is important to focus on proper sorting and preservation of these types of waste. The Ministry considers debris as a possible resource for the construction industry in the process of further reconstruction of Ukraine, she says.
“We are talking about the reuse of these materials, which means that the processing of raw materials must be at a high level. We strive to understand what percentage of the construction waste must necessarily be used in new materials production,” says Nataliya Kozlovska.
“Already during a large-scale war, in 2022, we adopted the law “On waste management”. Unfortunately, when this law was adopted, we did not understand the estimated volume of this waste would generate. Therefore, debris management was not regulated separately. Now we have to reflect it in the legislation so that the Cabinet of Ministers has grounds to develop relevant by-laws,” says MP Oleg Bondarenko, head of the Committee on Environmental Policy and Environmental Management.
Ukrainian parliamentarians are currently working on a bill on the basic principles of recovery. Member of the Parliament of Ukraine, Chairwoman of the Committee on the Organization of State Building, Local Self-Government, Regional Development, and Urban Planning Olena Shulyak notes that the document will include, among other things, the issue of debris management as an economic component of the reconstruction process.
“At the moment, no one has accurately calculated how much of the debris we have. There is no such methodology. It is a challenge and a task for every community to assess and understand the situation. Don’t just take it all to the landfill, but through the prism of these environmental issues, try to solve social and economic problems as well,” says Olena Shulyak.
A member of the Ukraine Support Team coalition, the ReThink NGO, is working on solving the issue of accounting the amount of debris. In cooperation with the Ministry for Restoration, they are developing methodological recommendations for determining the projected volumes of this type of waste based on foreign experience. Similar methodologies are effectively used in many countries, in particular Japan, to calculate the costs of dismantling, grinding, and processing debris. However, it is impossible to apply foreign formulas 100% for Ukraine due to the peculiarities of the climate, typical building materials, and the scale of destruction, says the head of the UST coalition and ReThink expert Olena Koltyk:
“Correct accounting of the volume of debris will help communities build effective comprehensive recovery plans. As well as business representatives involved in this recovery will get the understanding of how much raw material they will potentially have in one or another region.”
Representatives of Ukrainian businesses present at the event along with scientists assure that the reuse of waste from destruction is possible and can even improve the properties of products. However, the director of the “Kovalska” Innovation and Technology Center Victoria Spivak notes that it is important to qualitatively sort, grind, and fractionate waste to achieve this.
Since December 2022, UNDP has been working on solving this task. According to Roman Shakhmatenko, coordinator of the group of energy and environmental protection projects, during this time the organization supported the clearing of more than 170,000 tons of waste from the demolition:
“We are piloting our approach, which involves several steps: surveying locations for the presence of explosive objects, clearance of rubble, sorting, proper handling of asbestos, further separation of fractions, and grinding. The next stage should be processing. For this, we need to understand where exactly these raw materials can be used, what can be produced from them, and whether there is an economic model for this.”
MPs, representatives of the Ministry for Restoration and the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Kyiv Regional State Administration, UNDP, the Confederation of Builders of Ukraine, companies producing building materials “Kovalska” and CRH, scientists of the Ukrainian Research and Design Institute of Building Materials and Products, as well as representatives of the affected territorial communities took part in the event. More than 350 participants from different regions of Ukraine joined it online.
According to the latest estimates of the Ministry for Restoration, based on the reports of territorial communities affected by Russia’s armed aggression, more than 600,000 tons of debris have accumulated in the territories controlled by Ukraine, and only 6% of them are being reused. Management and processing of waste on a post-war scale will require a comprehensive approach, including the creation of the necessary regulatory framework; the development of a catalog of construction products manufactured using raw materials based on recycled waste; development of standards for the manufacture of such construction products.
The round table was held within the framework of the project “Rethink: Recommendations for Debris Management on the Frontlines” as a part of the Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative, implemented with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The team of the ReThink NGO, a member of the Ukraine Support Team (UST) coalition, continues to investigate the situation on the ground as part of a project to develop recommendations for the debris management.
“It is already clear that the majority of opinions boil down to the use of crushed debris for filling roads or leveling the terrain. Now it is important to understand whether it is possible to use the generated waste for the production of more valuable products, for example, construction products,” says the head of the UST coalition Olena Koltyk.
General situation in the region
According to the Kyiv Regional State Administration, as a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation, 28,800 objects were damaged in the territory of the region, the vast majority of which are private and multi-storey buildings – 26,000 objects. Demolition waste is currently stored at 32 sites for temporary storage in various communities.
With the support of Ukraine’s international partners, a pilot project on the processing of debris is being implemented in the Kyiv region. As part of cooperation, the region has already received 30 units of specialized equipment. According to Kyiv RSA data, three construction waste processing lines are planned to be launched in the region: a stationary one in Borodyanka and two mobile ones.
What is the situation on the ground?
In Bucha, debris is stored at a specially designated site. According to Yaroslav Duchenko, head of the Urban Improvement Inspection, the rubble of 130 buildings and one section of a high-rise building has already been dismantled in the city. The total volume of debris that reached the site of storage is 75,000 cubic meters. Most of it is concrete and bricks (about 51 thousand m³), as well as asbestos-containing materials (about 8 thousand m³). The main mass of debris is not sorted.
“Volumes, we estimate tentatively. We think they are 80% accurate. Of course, it would be more correct to sort them right on the spot, but the first sortings were simply taken out in bulk, as it was. Because it had to be done quickly, there were neither enough people nor enough time. The question was as follows: quickly disassemble, demolish on a pile, somewhere it was sorted, somewhere not – the equipment drives up and takes it away and the rebuilding process begins immediately”, explains Yaroslav Duchenko.
In Borodyanka, work on the dismantling of destroyed buildings is still ongoing, and sorted debris is stored at a special site, says the first deputy head of the village, Dmytro Negresha. Currently, negotiations are ongoing regarding the installation of a processing line nearby.
“We are left with 15 private houses and three sections in high-rise buildings that need to be dismantled. Recently, an entire 9-story building was dismantled in the center, concrete and bricks were crushed on the spot. They managed to dismantle and remodel the house in a week,” says Dmytro Negresha.
Near the village of Gorenka, ReThink experts discovered places of unauthorized dumping of hazardous waste from demolitions. In particular, a dirt road covered with crushed asbestos-containing slate, which is land pollution and a violation of Art. 239 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
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).
