Creating сhanges despite the crisis: waste management companies in Ukraine

Working no matter what’s happening – this is how the daily operations of Ukrainian waste management companies can be described during the war. Despite severe shortages of funding, time, and staff, they continue to operate under extremely difficult conditions and are still creating change in local waste management systems. As participants in the “Zero Waste Cities in Ukraine” project, supported by the LIFE Programme of the European Union, these companies are shifting the focus from “what to do with waste” to “how to prevent waste” in four pilot municipalities in Ukraine: Lutsk, Kherson, Pokrovsk (Donetsk region) and Derhachi (Kharkiv region). The last three are frontline cities.

Kherson region turns debris into resources for post-war recovery

War debris has become a major challenge for frontline municipalities. Destroyed infrastructure, limited funding, and ongoing hostilities have added thousands of tonnes of demolition waste to municipal streams. This was the reality faced by the Kherson’s utility company «Ekopolis» at the beginning of the full-scale war, but demolition waste has created two areas of work:

• Collection, sorting & accounting of raw materials. Currently about 9,000 tonnes of demolition waste are stored at a temporary site in Kherson municipality, where materials are sorted and  weighed using dynamic scales.
• International cooperation. With support from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, Kherson received a mobile crusher, a secondary impact crusher and a screening machine for processing demolition waste.

Every year, Kherson generates 40,000-44,000 tonnes of waste, of which 15-20% is paper, glass, and plastic. To divert recyclables from landfill, «Ekopolis» installed 197 mesh containers for PET bottles across the municipality. Most of the nets are located in the city, but some are in the surrounding area. Waste is collected as the containers fill up, with collection frequency also dependent on the security situation.

Even with system changes, some waste will still end up in landfills. To minimise environmental risks, «Ekopolis», together with the Kherson Regional Military Administration, launched a landfill monitoring programme where scientists regularly sample air, groundwater, and soil within the landfill and its sanitary protection zone. The Kherson municipality is working to:

• Reduce operating costs by increasing composting, recycling, and reuse.
• Attract funding for new infrastructure such as sorting stations and composters.
• Build partnerships with businesses and NGOs.
• Maintain public engagement through social media campaigns focused on waste prevention and household-level solutions.

Lutsk region: from sorting stations to landfill tours for children & students

The first project that really engaged Lutsk residents was the introduction of household waste sorting sites, as people understood the benefits, participation grew and the share of separately collected waste increased. In just one year, over 2,000 visitors learned the rules of separate collection at the Waste Management Center. Today, three sorting stations operate in the municipality: ”Chystyj Lutsk”, “Chysta Hromada” and “Chyste Dovkillia”.

The habit of sorting is paying off

According to Lutsk’s utility company Lutskspetskomuntrans, 65,500 tonnes of mixed waste were collected in 2024, compared to just 196 tonnes collected separately, less than 1% of the municipality’s total waste. Despite this low share, some progress is visible. For example, glass collection increased from 12 tonnes in 2024 to 27 tonnes in the first seven months of 2025. Separately collected materials also included 149 tonnes of PET plastic, 1.95 tonnes of polyethylene, 26 tonnes of scrap metal, 6.5 tonnes of paper and cardboard, and 611 kilograms of styrofoam. Utility workers believe that the real value here is not the weight, but people. Those who didn’t walk past and didn’t just throw things away carelessly, who didn’t toss bottles into the mixed waste, but consciously saved the containers, sorted them, and brought them to the appropriate bin.

Engaging children and adults through eco-education

Over the past academic year 1,630 schoolchildren visited the sorting stations in Lutsk learning about:

• The main types of waste
• How to sort waste
• Why it’s important not to buy unnecessary things and to use reusable items: textile bags, bottles and containers instead of plastic goods
• How can we protect the environment and make our native municipality cleaner and cozier

Every sincere review, every child’s “thank you”, every post of gratitude from teachers confirms: we are on the right track, we are doing important work. Because the culture of sorting starts with children; a new Ukraine starts with them, one where people sort and conserve resources. Where they don’t litter, but change their habits. Thank you to everyone who is with us in the ecological trend. Let’s keep working!. Volodymyr Martsenyuk, Head of utility company «Lutskspetskomuntrans»

In 2024 an educational classroom was opened at «Chystyj Lutsk» with the support of the city council. The space primarily serves children, but adults can also learn a lot here. Specialists are happy to talk about ways to reuse items. Children are frequent guests of this eco-space, as well as the local «Trash Land», the municipality’s nickname for the solid waste landfill.

Not only children, but students also visit the local landfill. There’s no better way to solidify knowledge for waste management. Here students from Lutsk National Technical University learned:

• How the system for waste collection, sorting and disposal is organised
• How the sorting station and the local solid waste landfill operate
• What the full cycle of waste management looks like: from collection to sorting and disposal

At the landfill visitors see how sorting happens, which waste is recyclable, what is done with bio- and hazardous waste, and, most importantly, the current scale of disposal. All of this helps students get a complete picture and understand what needs to be improved in the waste management system at the local and national levels.

Cooperation between city council, utility company and activists = reaching a wide audience

Working with children and youth is primary. But local authorities and utility companies understand: to reduce and prevent waste all residents must be involved. This is ongoing work with different audiences: parents, older people, new municipality’s residents (displaced people from frontline regions), business, educators and eco-activists.

Everyone can be united around zero waste and this is how the Zero Waste Fest eco-festival was created and organised jointly with the Lutsk City Council and NGO Zero Waste Lutsk.

The format of a weekend event with various activities worked perfectly for children and adults. There were also lectures and discussions for those who wanted to learn more about the zero waste principles and how they are implemented in the city.

Kharkiv region makes zero waste practices as an everyday habits

With the support from European and Ukrainian specialists in the “Zero Waste Cities in Ukraine” project, waste management companies are working on a household waste management strategy and waste prevention. Alongside they are testing zero waste practices, accessible for war time, such as sorting and composting. Here’s an experience of utility company «Derhachiekoresurs» in cooperation with NGO Kharkiv Zero Waste.

Today, we are not only maintaining cleanliness in the municipality, but also implementing modern practices for waste prevention and reduction, working with the public sector and international partners, and preparing the Derhachi region for the transition to European standards in waste management, where every decision is about efficiency, systematicity, and benefit for the entire municipality. Yaroslav Holizdra, Head of utility company “Derhachiekoresurs”

Derhachi is a new municipality for us. Although we had worked there before with demolition waste, this issue was painful for everyone, and it didn’t even need to be promoted in the frontline municipality. People need materials to restore their homes after shelling. It is more difficult to communicate the benefits of composting to people. How effective a particular solution will be depends on whether there are people in the municipality who take care of it locally. “Derhachiekoresurs” has done great work in this area, and we are already seeing results. But it is important for the residents themselves to take the initiative and actively use the composters, encouraging neighbors, friends, relatives. Anna Prokaeva, Head of Kharkiv Zero Waste

Residents are now actively participating by bringing vegetable and fruit scraps, leaves, grass, and other organic materials for composting. The collected bio-waste is sent to industrial composting facilities to be converted into organic fertilizer.

The Derhachi region has a lifehack to educate residents who take personal composters: with a container they receive a calendar and a hint-sticker with composting rules. Paper calendars are still popular among locals. Thus, they learn something new about composting every month from the calendar and the new habit gradually becomes routine.

Composters were delivered to Derhachi in September 2025, and since then have collected mostly typical autumn materials: fallen leaves, small branches, and garden residues, with some containers also containing vegetable and fruit scraps. Whilst leaves alone shouldn’t make up the entire contents, utility workers recognise that developing new habits takes time. What matters most is that residents are engaging with composting and showing genuine interest in reducing their waste, a clear sign of their willingness to learn.

In Ukraine still there are municipalities under shelling. They have to be rebuilt with a new waste management system

Post-war reconstruction is fundamentally about change, complex, costly and long-term. However, it also presents a unique opportunity to build back better, particularly in the field of waste management. Pokrovsk, a frontline municipality in Donetsk region, aims to move beyond outdated practices by prioritising waste prevention as a core goal.

During the “Zero Waste Cities” project Pokrovsk is collaborating with specialists from the research institution Laboratório da Paisagem (Guimarães, Portugal) and NGO Mariupol Zero Waste. Together they are developing a comprehensive waste management strategy intended to become a cornerstone of the municipality’s post-war reconstruction plan.

Unlike other project participants the ongoing war in Pokrovsk makes a physical morphological analysis of household waste impossible. Despite this, the city has successfully analysed historical data to develop multiple scenarios for the evolution of its waste management system.

Oleg Frolov, Head of Strategic Planning and Communications in Pokrovsk military administration in Donetsk region, emphasised the necessity of a systematic approach:

It is clear that waste must be meticulously sorted before it ever reaches a landfill. Only by combining robust state oversight with local measures to prevent, reuse and recycle waste can we significantly reduce our environmental footprint. 

The transition to a sustainable system requires both policy changes and a shift in public mindset. Natalia Gaetska, Head of Mariupol Zero Waste, advocates for a zero waste hierarchy that disincentivises landfills:

We need a new pricing policy where disposing of mixed waste is always more expensive than sorted waste. Between the point of generation waste and the landfill there must be a wide range of alternatives: recycling, composting, reuse, repair. If a city prioritizes prevention and motivates its residents, the landfill naturally becomes the last and least desirable solution. We shouldn’t wait for people to spontaneously decide to sort and compost waste, we need to create opportunities for it right now. And these principles must be included into the rules of post-war life.

While Ukrainian defenders fight for freedom in the territories temporarily occupied by Russia, Pokrovsk is proactively planning its ecological recovery and encouraging other frontline municipalities to do the same.

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 The Zero Waste Cities in Ukraine project is financed by the European Union. The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or CINEA. Neither the European Union nor the funding body can be held responsible for them.