Glass is one of our most fascinating and recyclable materials. The more you know about it, the better you’ll be able to reuse it.
- Mother Nature is responsible for producing naturally occurring high-silica-content glass (otherwise known as obsidian or extrusive igneous rock), which is the product of rapidly cooling felsic volcanic lava or meteor/lightning strikes.
- Broken and crushed glass collected via municipal recycling programs is called “cullet” and is eco-friendly since it consumes 25% less energy than glass produced with 100% raw materials, in turn generating fewer greenhouse gases.
- Man-made glass is a combination of extremely high-temperature molten silicon dioxide with calcium carbonate and sodium carbonate, often augmented with cullet.
- There are more than 49 glass-manufacturing facilities across America and 65 plants that are solely dedicated to processing cullet.
- Glass is one of the most sustainable consumer materials — considered to be a truly “cradle-to-cradle” packaging material since it never loses its integrity during the recycling process and is infinitely recyclable — and yet U.S. citizens dispose of “enough glass every two weeks to fill a skyscraper comparable in size to the 1,350-foot towers of the World Trade Center.”
- Glass never decomposes, making it the worst candidate for landfill entombment! Experts suggest that it would take 1 million years for a simple glass bottle to completely break down under normal landfill conditions.
- 10 gallons of oil is saved with every ton of recycled glass collected by municipal programs, reducing air pollution by as much as 20%.
- Recycled glass can transition from the recycling facility back into a new container in as little as one month.
- For each ton of glass that is collected via recycling programs, 1,300 pounds of sand, 410 pounds of soda ash, 380 pounds of limestone and 151 pound of feldspar are saved along with 2 cubic yards of landfill space and 42 kWh of electricity — the equivalent of a 4.46-ton reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
- Of the 41 billion glass containers manufactured in the United States every year, 11,390,000 tons are discarded annually.
- The Waste Management Recycle America Alliance uses 50% of the glass collected via nationwide curbside programs as a landfill layering material called “roadbed” (to minimize wind-carried “blow-offs”) as well as road aggregate and sandblasting grit.
- Other unique applications for recycled cullet include erosion-combating alterni-beach sand, glass countertops, fiberglass insulation, kitchen tiles and glassphalt (which consists of thoroughly washed/crushed recycled glass blended with natural aggregate, bitumen and preserving agents).
- Glass that is processed in recycling facilities must be sorted by color before undergoing glass “decolorization,” with specific chemicals added to achieve each unique recycled glass tone (from green all the way to amber).
- The bottoms of all glass bottles are engraved with an embossed “peanut” code as well as an ink-jet code (only visible under black light) that reveals the location that it was manufactured.
- Glass-like products that cannot be recycled along with conventional silicon-based material in traditional processing facilities, include crystal, light bulbs, mirrors and Pyrex, since they all melt at varying temperatures and contain chemical contaminants. Windshield glass (while also recyclable) must be processed separately since it consists of two layers of glass sandwiched between a PVC membrane.
- When you recycle one single glass bottle, enough energy is saved to illuminate a 100-watt light bulb for four hours or power a computer or television for close to half an hour.
- Rather than recycling glass containers, which consumes a great deal of energy, the Grassroots Recycling Network suggests that the U.S. embrace a refillable container system modeled after what Latin American and European countries employ.
Mary Nurre
November 18th, 2010
Great! Informative. Well written. Appreciate you sharing these facts.
wade jensen
November 19th, 2010
My larger goals include handeling the recycling issues at the site, ie landfills. Our system of curbside recycling is too burdensome to get the results industrial recyclers can get at one central location. I sometimes feel that no matter how much my family recycles we’re just not making a meaningful difference. So I’ve decided to change that and go after the source of the probem… waste. There is current tech that can reduce volumes to 65% and to 95% with recycling. Only catch-there is no opermitting availabe only temporary licences that don’t get renewed. Soon we will all have the incentives to change. Good job getting out the facts about glass recycling!
Travis Cohn
November 24th, 2010
Thanks Eliza for the scoope, and moreover, for directing our attention to this very special material that we so often take for granted.
There really js something to be said for a material that can be ‘infilnitly’ recreated with zero loss of integrity. I don’t mean to get too religious, but isn’t there something kind of biblical about that?..And the way that it transmits light…
I’m sorry, but I wonder if this material deserves just a bit more reverence than it is often afforded. I wonder if it was ever bestowed with this reverence by other ancient peoples. (what would the ancient Egyptians, who worshiped the regenerative Plant God of Osiris thought of such a substance?)
Sad to think of so much useful stuff landing in landfills today. What is our excuse for this? What ever happened to our bottle deposit programs? Its seems it was not that long ago that we remembered the value of glass. Many of you probably remember, how did we forget?
I agree that we need economic incentives (to encourage reUse of the glass) and also better designed waste receptacles, to assure this resource doesn’t slip through our fingers. I remember in San Francisco, every public trash can had a steel basket suspended above the ‘trash’ can. Perhaps if every garbage can was designed with this option to seperate on the spot, less would get ‘entombed’ out of simple inconvenience. We have to make it easy for ourselves to do right, and hard to do wrong, which of course requires an initial investment of good design.
Thanks again for shedding some light on the hidden values this undervalued resource, Elizah.
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[...] cauldron with countless other post-consumer glass bottles almost seems like a pity. Granted, the glass recycling process ensures that such a precious resource stays out of our landfills, but there has to be a better way [...]