Let’s take a harder look at glass. Or even better, let’s look through glass. What do you see? Technically speaking, glass is not a true solid, it’s actually a “super-cooled fluid”. However, to the average joe, this doesn’t make a blind bit of difference, it only really matters to students of old windows who need to know that due to the slow flow of glass under the full of gravity makes an old window thicker at the bottom.
Glass is made from silica, soda ash and limestone. Silica and limestone are quarry products whereas soda ash is produced in large volumes by the worldwide chemicals industry. All the ingredients are melted together at very high temperatures to produce the endless varieties of glass we use today. These range from glass fibres used in insulation via plate glass used in windows and car windscreens, to container glass used in bottles and jars.
A huge amount of energy is used in the chain of processes leading to the production of glass items. So using recycled glass to make thing such as recycled glass vases must be a good thing for the environmemnt, right?
Up to a point. The unfortunate fact is that the majority of products we buy that contain glass contain brand new glass. The reason for this is that manufacturers tend to insist on uniformity and creating glass like that is only feasibleby creating it from scratch
The absolute best thing you can do with old glass products like bottles and jars is to clean them out and re-use them for the original purpose. In the UK, this only takes place with milk bottles which are delivered to houses. These are cleaned and reused an average of 12 times. The reason why reusing glass is so successful in this form is because alongside dropping off fresh milk the milk delivery system also involves picking up old bottles. The biggest reasons why other types of bottle recycling has not worked is mainly down to the lack of cooperation from retailers who don’t want to organise the collection process, and then the cost of returning imported bottles for products such as wine.
So most bottles are ground down to make a raw material called cullet, which could then be re-melted to form part of glass production. But it isn’t. In fact, the glass that does end up being recycled ends up in aggregate mixtures which are used to make road surfaces. Practially all of the bottles that we do end up recycling and made from brand new glass. Your recycling efforts won’t change that. The reason is that the costs of transporting cullet, its uncertain composition, and the precise specifications needed in the glass bottle industry make it impossible.
Plate glass has an even worse excuse. A huge amount of glass is used for replacing old glass for things like double glazing units and windscreens. Ever wondered where your old windows go? They go to landfill. The reason why this happens is because it just takes too much time and costs too much to remove the glass.
It is a real challenge to find a shop that sells products created from used glass. They should be treasured and encouraged because their producers are able to demonstrate that it can be done. So here’s a great link to a retailer that stocks a number of recycled glass products, including recycled glass tableware such as plates, bowls and wine glasses, as well as colourful recycled glass bathroom accessories such as soap dispensers.
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