By Ukraine Rebuild News Staff
Fighting has smashed windows in towns and villages in large parts of Ukraine and a lack of glass to replace them is preventing many refugees from resettling, The Guardian writes in a feature report.
The country lost its only sheet glass factory in the Russian invasion last year and only now is preparing to build another one, in the city of Berezan near Kiev, the newspaper said. In the meantime, costs for glass in the country have doubled and the quality has dipped as locals turn to imports.
Kostyantyn Saliy, president of the All-Ukrainian Union of Building Materials Manufacturers, said Ukraine needs 750 million sq m of glass to reglaze.
Meanwhile, a charity called Insulate Ukraine, led by 27-year-old Cambridge student Harry Blakiston Houston, is working to replace windows with a much cheaper and quicker version of polyethylene, PVC piping, pipe insulation and duct tape, the Guardian writes. The replacement is also blast-proof,
The charity has so far fitted 6,000 windows in Ukraine but Blakiston Houston said the United Nations, the largest funder of such reconstruction efforts, follows a “build back better” protocol that dictates all windows be replaced by similar quality materials or better. Under that policy, he says, he is having trouble scaling up his project.
