Euro News Green occasionally has outstanding stories, and this is one of them.
Russia has bombed entire apartment blocks, maternity hospitals, schools, theatres, houses, and industrial buildings, not only slaughtering and wounding thousands of innocent people in Putin's ongoing resource war against Ukraine; The war crimes also generated mountains and mountains of construction debris for Ukraine to deal with once Russia is driven out of the country, and victory is assured. I call that Crimes against the Planet.
Debris, such as waste from twisted rebar and chunks of concrete, is everywhere. Even the casual observer of the coverage wonders how this battered nation will rebuild. What do you do with mountains of concrete rubble? Landfills can't handle the volume of debris that has been generated. And reconstruction from the ground up will generate vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of a world teetering on the edge of the apocalyptic climate tipping point.
So what to do? Dmitry Rodionov, the director of Kopach Profi, a construction firm, has been pondering the arduous task of rebuilding his country. He believes recycling concrete debris is the solution.
The question arises: What should be done with such a massive quantity of construction waste? No landfill is capable of processing such a volume, which could lead to not only an economic but also an environmental catastrophe.Kopach Profi has not been in business for long, only since 2019. But the company was already operating before the Russians changed the lives of Ukrainians forever. The company had been "processing waste at one of the country's largest metallurgical plants in nearby Zaporizhzhia. Seven days a week, its equipment extracted useful products from the 200,000 tonnes of material dumped every month."
The waste processing plants have been shut, and their industrial facilities redirected to defeat the invaders.
Eurogreen News is the source of this story. They interviewed Dmitry Rodionov, and he explained the problem with recycling concrete. The final product is low-grade material used as a 'base for roads". So he has looked at his European neighbors because they are innovating new ways to recycle construction waste.
The results are mixed. Some countries are doing better than others. "In its guidelines, the EU is moving closer to a 'closed loop of demolition,' where a much smaller proportion of building waste is sent to landfills."
From the 2018 EU Construction and Demolition Waste Protocol and Guidelines:
Based on independent research, the Commission is introducing the non-binding guidelines as a proposal to the industry. This Protocol fits within the Construction 2020 strategyEN•••, as well as the Communication on Resource Efficiency Opportunities in the Building SectorEN•••. It's also part of the European Commission’s ambitious and more recently adopted Circular Economy PackageEN•••. Its overall aim is to increase confidence in the Construction and Demolition waste management process and the trust in the quality of Construction and Demolition recycled materials. This will be achieved by
- Improved waste identification, source separation and collection
- Improved waste logistics
- Improved waste processing
- Quality management
- Appropriate policy and framework conditions
Lottie Limb, who does an excellent job with this article at Euro Green News, writes:
A professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) has teamed up with innovators in Belgium and the Netherlands to develop a more complete way of recycling concrete.
The building staple is made up of stones or gravel, sand, a binder - typically cement - and water. All these solid components can be extracted from waste, explains Professor Hubert Rahier.
“Sand and gravel come loose from the concrete if you grind it mechanically in a particular way. The finer part containing the hydrated and thus ‘finished’ cement must then be reprocessed until it becomes usable again as a binder.”
Dutch company Slim Breker has created the eponymous ‘SmartCrusher’ machine which does the separating.
A specially designed high-powered microwave oven then gets to work on the cement power, heating it up to 600°C to break it out of its chemical bond and return it to a reusable state.
“This uses electricity generated by solar panels, at our partner Rutte in Zaandam, so the whole process can be done without additional carbon emissions,” Rahier says.
This technology is new and is being fine-tuned, according to reporting by Limb. It is not yet ready for prime time, but it will be by the year's end.
Retrieving construction material, especially when missiles and drones continue to bombard Ukraine, will not be easy. But the players in this effort firmly believe the reconstruction can be done with recyclables once Russia is out of their country. Planners have likely come together to help Ukraine with reconstruction, and with Europe’s merging concrete recycling technologies, a silk purse can be made with a sow's ear.