Recycling Articles : Recycling Glass

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Glass is one of the oldest packaging materials known to man with anthropologists dating its origins to around 3000BC in Mesopotamia, during the Bronze Age. Glass has been used in the transportation of liquids ever since and is convenient to form into various shapes and sizes whilst remaining strong and fairly light.

Luckily, glass is one of the safest and least toxic waste products that we produce large-scale. The raw materials that are used in its production are cost-effective and easily available although the quarrying of sand does have environmental implications. Glass does not decompose since it is not made from biological compounds, although neither does it release toxic chemicals in its decomposition as plastics do.

The chief benefit of recycling glass is that it decreases our overall energy consumption since it takes less energy to recycle a glass than to fire new glass.

Glass is an interesting material when it comes to recycling since it can be melted down and recycled with barely any loss to quality and so one bottle can be almost infinitely recycled back into another bottle with few waste-products from the process. The recycling of glass is rigorously clean, with magnets being used to extract any metals from the crushed glass (called cullet) before it is melted down again.

Up to 8% of the weight of the annual total solid waste in the UK is comprised of glass and recycling glass saves 50% of the energy required to produce new glass as well as helping to prevent the destructio of eco-systems by sand quarrying.

Recycling glass is also relatively easy with roadside collections and glass recycling bins being very common in the UK. These are usually located near large supermarkets or in high streets although it is important to sort the bottles by their colour before recycling so that they can be easily turned into new products again.

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