Russian bombardments have generated more than a billion tons of debris across Ukraine since 2022. Now, local and international efforts are meticulously sorting the bricks, concrete, metal, and wood, preparing these materials for a second life in new buildings and roads.
In 2024, about two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Anna Prokayeva sensed an opportunity. While the nation’s landfills were overflowing with debris from Russian bombing campaigns, the frontline village of Ruska Lozova — occupied for several months in 2022 — was crying out for reconstruction materials, its residents desperate to start putting their lives back together.
For Prokayeva, executive director of Zero Waste Kharkiv, the easternmost link of the Zero Waste Europe network, the quandary triggered an idea: Engage local volunteers to recover the parts of Ruska Lozova’s bomb-flattened village hall, then make this material available for other construction projects. If the pilot operation — which was designed to deal with the problem of war waste and teach residents how to use it to rebuild their homes — was successful, it could expand.
Russian bombardments have generated more than 1.5 billion tons of war debris across Ukraine, with the mangled heaps multiplying daily as Russian forces relentlessly pummel towns and cities. Along the battle fronts, hundreds of towns languish in ruins.
Russian forces had occupied Ruska Lozova for four months, laying waste to two thirds of the village. Just 700 people of the original population of 5,000 remained: those too poor — or too stubborn — to flee. These villagers had received some state monies for reconstruction, yet they needed more to repair their homesteads.
Anna Prokaeva gathers bricks from a pile of rubble.
Courtesy of Zero Waste Kharkiv
In the summer of 2024, the Ruska Lozova village council approved Zero Waste Kharkiv’s petition to dismantle and sort the pile of rubble and building parts that was once the village hall and encouraged locals to pitch in. “It was seven of us, every volunteer over the age of 50,” says Prokayeva, a former TV journalist who is 44. The group worked five days a week for a month, sorting and transporting materials to a newly established ”circular construction yard” and shoveling the smallest bits of debris into empty metal drums for future reuse. Since her husband, an army officer, was stationed at the front, Prokayeva brought her son Nikola, who was then two years old, with her when daycare was closed.
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The materials recovered by the brigade using pickaxes, crowbars, and shovels included 13,000 bricks, many of which the team refurbished and gave to local residents — up to 500 per family. Concrete and rubble were used to fill potholes and bomb craters. Zero Waste Kharkiv demonstrated to the villagers how crushed rock, brick, and recovered bits of insulation can be used to fill hollow spaces in walls when new insulation is unavailable or unaffordable. Wood was repurposed for construction or used to heat buildings; twisted and bent metal was sent to recycling companies; roofing tiles and plumbing fixtures were stacked in the circular construction yard. By last December, the site of the village hall was vacant and ready for new construction. Today, it hosts a new council building.
Workers clear rubble at a house hit by Russian shelling in Ruska Lozova.
Hnat Holyk / Gwara Media / Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
The volume of war rubble in Ukraine — estimated by the United Nations to be the largest in Europe since World War II destroyed Germany — makes it ideal for demonstrating how waste from war can be recovered and reused. The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) is leading a major debris management effort, which countrywide has cleared nearly 800,000 tons of rubble, with 150,000 tons thus far processed into gravel for repairing roads.
Other nations are pitching in. An Australian company has set up a mobile plant near Kyiv that transforms gravel, glass, and plastic bottles into bricks that snap together — no mortar needed — and can be used to build homes and sidewalks. The Japanese government is training Ukrainians to operate state-of-the-art mobile rock crushers and sorting machines. The equipment has helped the municipality of Derhachi, for example, process more than 100,000 tons of waste. Japan is also testing the first-ever A.I.-enhanced robotic cleanup machinery in Ukraine’s destroyed townships, which will reduce costs and increase safety in areas that may contain landmines, unexploded ordnance, and toxic materials.
In the Derhachi operation, powerful pneumatic shears strip metal reinforcements from the largest chunks of concrete and brickwork. Next, the chunks are loaded onto a crusher that pulverizes them into gravel. The latest German-made screening machines use artificial intelligence and infrared technology to precisely sort this debris, segregating impurities like black plastics and metals. The machines can process 300 tons of rubble per hour. The resulting product has been distributed across the Kharkiv region to be used as road fill.
Bricks that can snap together without mortar are being made from recycled rubble at a site near Kyiv.
Mobile Crisis Construction
“Thus far, road work has absorbed all of the crushed bricks, cement blocks, and concrete that our operations have produced,” explains Oleksii Pechenyi of UNDP Ukraine. “But there’s so much more that we currently have stored, to say nothing of that which lies before us. We want this [material] used in actual reconstruction.”
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Leon Black, a specialist in infrastructure materials at the University of Leeds, told Radio Free Europe that the sheer volume of material is daunting. “You can’t landfill it, you can’t just ignore it, you can’t even use it for filling holes because there aren’t that many holes that need filling.” Black is introducing Ukrainians to new technology that breaks concrete down into its constituent parts: gravel, sand, and dried cement paste. This way, the wreckage can be upcycled into an aggregate that can be turned into concrete that’s viable for many kinds of construction.
But Ukrainian law prohibits this, at least at the moment. Concrete fabricated with recycled content is less dense and stable than concrete made with virgin aggregate. The UNDP is currently working with Ukrainian authorities to amend those laws to ensure the safety of recycled concrete and allow its reuse. Until that happens, the crushed rock sits in storage facilities.
Rubble is broken down at a recycling station in Bucha.
Kseniia Nevenchenko / UNDP Ukraine
In Ruska Lozova, less than 19 miles from the Russian border, the sound of artillery rumbles much of the day, and the buzzing of drones regularly sends locals scurrying for cover as speakers blast a recorded announcement: “Attention! An air alert has been declared in the city!”
But the work of Zero Waste Kharkiv — which unlike other recycling operations in the country aims to repurpose all war wreckage, sending nothing to landfills or incinerators —continues. And where there are no machines, Prokayeva says, volunteers can do this work with hand tools and protective safety gear.
She sees nothing strange about working toward a sustainable economy in a frontline city that is plied almost daily with drone and missile salvos. Recovering building materials “makes the most sense in wartime,” she says, gesturing toward stacks of dismantled doors and window frames and a long row of giant bags filled with various categories of plastics. “We need to reuse and recycle everything we can because there are shortages all the time.”
“In Ukraine, thinking about recycling is way behind,” Prokayeva says. “Most destroyed [building] stock is tossed into landfills without a second thought.” Since 2017, Prokayeva has made it her mission to educate residents of the Kharkiv canton about the zero waste concept. “Prevent, reduce, reuse, recycle, and compost,” she says, explaining the hierarchy of closed-loop circular systems that 400 European municipalities, including Kharkiv, have pledged to follow.
Workers gravel a road with recycled debris in the village of Zdvyzhivka.
UNDP Ukraine
For the last seven years, Prokayeva’s recycling station in Kharkiv has abided by that pledge for household rubbish: It sends second-hand clothes to hospitals and refugee centers, toys and bedding to orphanages. More recently, the center began collecting spent batteries and sending them to facilities that reconfigure and integrate them into weaponized drones. During the 2022 invasion, the center’s empty bottles went to making Molotov cocktails for the city’s defense. Prokayeva organized that effort from a hospital bed: She was in labor.
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“It’s doable, that’s what we wanted to show,” Prokayeva says of the Ruska Lozova operation, noting that any Ukrainian village can do it. She says that the destroyed village hall contained no asbestos, which must be handled by certified professionals, and that Zero Waste Kharkiv circumvented Ukrainian specifications that don’t allow secondhand bricks to be used in new construction by advocating their use only in nonresidential structures like garages and sheds.
Zero Waste Kharkiv has picked out another war casualty in Ruska Lozova to recycle in 2026, a building much larger than the village hall. The organization needs to train every volunteer it can reach: when the war finally ends, recovery will entail rebuilding much of the nation. Says Prokayeva, “Zero waste and the circular economy can change the way we reconstruct Ukraine.”
