A team of UBC Okanagan students has shown that recycling rubble from destroyed buildings can help Ukraine rebuild its roads when the war eventually ends.

As part of their year-end capstone project, six School of Engineering students worked on an initiative called “Rebuilding Ukraine.” They partnered with Dr. Kate Woodman and Iryna Storozhuk, the founding members of Okanagan 4 Ukraine, and four Ukrainian engineers to test the idea of using rubble from destroyed buildings to rebuild roads.

Dr. Woodman reached out to numerous Canadian universities and organizations—including the Canada-Ukraine Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Embassy in Ukraine, the Canadian Ukrainian Foundation and Engineers without Borders—to find groups willing to help the country.

“Of the more than 25 engineering faculties I wrote to, many said this was a new idea—finding ways to support a country during an active war,” says Dr. Woodman. “I’m glad the UBCO team took it on. This project shows how Canadian universities can contribute to humanitarian engineering and post-conflict resilience while giving students valuable international experience.”

The six students—Alexa Hum, Alexander Marcuzzi, Arman Hajiabdolmajid, Hans Nicolajsen Suarez, Jacques Aritanto and Yugandher Ghugare—worked with faculty advisors Drs. Dimitry Sediako, Jonathan Holzman, Suliman Gargoum and Gordon Lovegrove. They explored using the ruins of buildings to create the right type of concrete strong enough to rebuild the road network.

Arman Hajiabdolmajid, who is finishing his studies at UBCO this year, explains that the team designed a strong, reliable concrete mix that can be used as a solid and reliable road surface to rebuild the country’s existing but heavily damaged transportation infrastructure.

“Due to the ongoing war, there are large amounts of waste material in the form of rubble and debris, and if not put to use, will end up in landfills and eventually overwhelm the country’s waste system,” says Hajiabdolmajid. “By recycling the concrete rubble as a replacement for aggregate, a major component in concrete, we can put this rubble to good use rather than discarding it.”

He adds that recycling rubble also helps reduce the need to extract the traditional fine and coarse aggregate from riverbeds and quarries, as the recycled concrete proves to be a suitable substitution.

“As rebuilding begins, demand for materials will increase, potentially depleting local reserves. This could lead to costly imports as substitutes,” he adds. “And the country’s waste system is not designed to process the amount of waste material produced from this war.”

A typical concrete mix consists of cement, fine aggregate or sand, gravel or coarse aggregate, water and additives that enhance the final product. To reuse rubble from Ukraine, the debris must be crushed into fine sand. This involves gathering and transporting the damaged concrete to a processing site where materials like metal, plastic, glass and wood are removed and disposed of properly.

In the UBCO lab, the students gathered concrete waste from past experiments to create a solution that included the highest volume of recycled fine aggregate while still meeting strength requirements. They used compression testing to monitor the concrete’s strength after seven, 14 and 28 days.

Although concrete roads are not common in Ukraine, the team chose concrete over asphalt because it has a longer lifespan. Reusing rubble also supports some United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and makes the mix more environmentally friendly. The students created a sustainable, high-performance concrete using 30% recycled aggregate. It passed lab testing at UBCO and exceeded benchmarks required for European road infrastructure. To complete the project, they also created a prototype sensor to detect internal concrete cracks or instability.

Dr. Jonathan Holzman, an electrical engineering professor, says this innovative approach helps solve resource scarcity and sustainability problems.

“Our capstone projects give students hands-on, real-world experiences before they even graduate. Working with the Okanagan 4 Ukraine team and engineers in Ukraine gave these students the opportunity to make a difference in a country that will—hopefully, one day soon—begin the path to reconstruction.”

Britain’s Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) – a non-profit dedicated to analysing and categorising cyber incidents in the UK – has declared the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) cyber attack a Category 3 Systemic Event on its “hurricane” scale and believes the overall financial cost to the economy adds up to about £1.9bn so far.

The cyber attack – linked to the loosely affiliated Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters hacking collective – shut down JLR’s assembly lines, with ripple effects spreading quickly across the UK’s automotive supply chain and harming more than 5,000 other organisations so far.

The CMC said its estimate, which sits within a modelled range of £1.6 to £2.1bn but may yet run higher, reflected the substantial disruption to JLR’s own capabilities and downstream organisations.

It cautioned that the estimate was still sensitive to multiple assumptions, with some key factors in this including whether or not JLR’s operational technology (OT) infrastructure was affected, and exactly when the organisation is able to fully restore its production lines – based on the time it took to reboot JLR production after the first Covid-19 lockdown, it estimates that this may not be until January 2026.

It described the JLR cyber attack as the single most economically damaging cyber event to ever hit the UK.

“That should make us all pause and think, and then – as the National Cyber Security Centre [NCSC] said so forcefully last week – it’s time to act. Every organisation needs to identify the networks that matter to them, and how to protect them better, and then plan for how they’d cope if the network gets disrupted,” said CMC technical committee chair and former NCSC lead Ciaran Martin.

CMC chief executive Will Mayes added: “We tend to think of systemic cyber risk as something that spreads through shared IT infrastructure: the cloud, a common software platform, or self-propagating malware. What this incident demonstrates is how a cyber attack on a single major manufacturer can cascade through thousands of businesses, disrupting suppliers, transport and local economies, and triggering billions in losses across the UK economy.

“No single organisation can manage these risks alone. Industry, insurers and government each have a role in strengthening the UK’s operational resilience. The CMC’s purpose is to create a shared, trusted evidence base that supports better decisions following major cyber events.”

The CMC’s assessment also considered some of the human impacts of the JLR attack, noting that while it had not endangered human life in the same way as cyber attacks on NHS bodies might, it had affected the job security of thousands, with knock-on consequences for mental and physical wellbeing and household resilience, as well as compound effects on existing economic, regional or social inequalities.

Phil Wright, partner at business advisory and accountancy firm Menzies, said the JLR incident demonstrated how exposed supply chains really are to disruption.

“The ripple effects stretch far beyond JLR itself. This isn’t just about delayed orders. Warehousing, logistics and even communication tools are paralysed, showing how fragile integrated supply chains become when a single system goes down,” he said.

“Integrated supply chains demand that all suppliers, regardless of size, need to critically evaluate the adequacy of their IT security infrastructure. The cost of more advanced infrastructure may be prohibitive for smaller players further down the chain, but their lack of resilience can mean that an incident proportional to their scale could be terminal.”

The UK government is being pressed for a response as to why a major, multi-hour Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in the US disrupted UK-based organisations, including HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and Lloyds Banking Group.

The outage, which AWS confirmed started just before 8am UK time on 20 October, originated in AWS’s US-East-1 datacentre region in North Virginia, and caused large-scale disruption to a host of companies across the world, including in the UK.

The US-East-1 region is renowned for being Amazon’s first and flagship cloud region, as well as its largest, and is often the place where the public cloud giant rolls out new services to customers first.

For this reason, it is not unheard of for service issues with the US-East-1 region to blight overseas users of the firm’s cloud technologies.

But with concerns mounting in the UK (and other geographies) about the public and private sector’s over-reliance on US-based big tech platforms, the outage has led to renewed calls for greater transparency about the resiliency of the nation’s hosting arrangements.

“The narrative of bigger is better and biggest is best has been shown for the lie it always has been,” Owen Sayers, an independent security architect and data protection specialist with a long history of working in the public sector, told Computer Weekly. “The proponents of hyperscale cloud will always say they have the best engineers, the most staff and the greatest pool of resources, but bigger is not always better – and certainly not when countries rely on those commodity global services for their own national security, safety and operations.

“Nationally important services must be recognised as best delivered under national control, and as a minimum, the government should be knocking on AWS’s door today and asking if they can in fact deliver a service that guarantees UK uptime,” he said. “Because the evidence from this week’s outage suggests that they cannot.”