War’s environmental consequences: How to dispose of waste from destroyed infrastructure?

Reusing rubble from destroyed buildings is possible, and Ukraine has the resources to implement it

Even before the full-scale invasion, construction waste made up the bulk of waste in landfills. With the beginning of a full-scale war, the share of such waste has increased significantly because russian rockets and artillery fire are destroying Ukrainian civil infrastructure.

However, "war waste" can be returned to civilian circulation and reused as secondary raw materials, Rubryka reports.

Kyrylo Kosourov, the board chair of Hazardous Waste Management Association, a member of public councils under the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources and the Ministry of Economic Development and the State Regulatory Service of Ukraine, named these methods: 

• One can return the shredded metal to circulation after remelting.
• Construction stone residues are suitable for producing various construction products. First, we are talking about road fillings, which can be used to fill up the holes caused by missile blasts.
• Surviving building ruins are suitable as building materials.
• Fallen trees are turned into woodchips.
• Crushed stone from recycled concrete is used to fill swamps and pits and create temporary roads.
• Asphalt is reused in road construction, but first, it is thermally treated at a very high temperature.
• Rebar is also reused in construction and many other cases.
• One can also use such waste in building structures to create low-grade concrete. There are factories in Ukraine to produce such concrete, and if their capacities are insufficient, our European partners will help. The State Scientific Research Institute of Building Structures is the representative of Ukraine in the International Federation of Concrete. The institution's employees have already requested the opportunity to use the European countries' experience using concrete from construction waste.

Read about how these methods are already being implemented in Kharkiv here.