Environment - BRITISH GLASS
Glass recycling – an environmental winner
Environmental issues are in the news now more than ever. People across the country are reading up on reducing their carbon footprint, reducing waste and lowering emissions.
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Recycling is one way we can all do our bit. Glass has always been at the forefront of the recycling industry and it is also easy to get your kids involved in the recycling process. Glass is 100% recyclable. It doesn’t lose quality, no matter how many times it is recycled. After re-melting and forming new bottles and jars, the containers are as pure and clean as those made from raw materials. Of course, recycling of glass is nothing new in this country. People have been used to milk bottle collections for years. Meanwhile, glass is by far the most recycled packaging material in the UK. Things have come a long way over the last 30 years since the first bottle bank was launched in Barnsley in 1977.
Since then, more than 22,500 glass recycling sites have sprung up across the UK – containing 50,000 bottle banks to collect the different colours of glass separately. Now glass is even collected via council kerbside schemes – making glass recycling even more convenient for many households. This means that more than a million tonnes of glass are recycled in the UK in every year. This in turn saves more than a million tonnes of raw materials being quarried, helping protect the landscape as well as protecting the environment.
Forest the size bigger than Greater London
How much can you and your family do to prevent climate change through recycling glass? It’s only a small effort to take your bottles and jars to a recycling point, or use your council’s collection service but collectively, the results can be amazing. Every family uses about 330 bottles and jars every year. If you were to recycle all of these, you are helping to save enough energy to power a TV for nearly four and a half days. That’s enough to watch 210 episodes of Coronation Street!
Glass recycling saves energy and reduces carbon emissions. Some 200,000 tonnes of carbon are saved each year by glass recycling. That’s an equivalent annual reduction to removing over 57,000 cars from UK roads.
Carbon off-setting has been a major discussion point of late. If you were to use an off-setting scheme to counteract a similar amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere, you would need to plant almost 10 million trees. To do this, you would need to plant a forest bigger than Greater London.
What happens next?
Recycled glass packaging is used in all market sectors, from wine and beer to spirits and foods, but what happens to the glass after you have dropped your bottle in the bank? The collected bottles and jars are crushed, then all unwanted, non-glass materials are removed in specialised glass treatment plants. Hand picking, magnets, giant vacuums, digital cameras and even lasers are used to detect and remove contaminants.
The clean glass is then sent to the glass container manufacturer. Here, it is mixed with additional raw materials and fed into a furnace. The molten glass from the furnace is fed into the bottle-making machines. Here bottles and jars are automatically pressed and blown into shape.
Once the containers have been cooled they undergo a series of quality control checks before being sent to the filler. Once filled, they are distributed to the retailer and ultimately, to the consumer where the recycling process can begin again! Glass produced in this way is as pure and natural as glass made from raw materials. In fact, the three-stage process described above can take place for ever, without any loss of quality.
Other uses?
In the UK around 50% of the glass collected is green. Because much of this glass is imported, mainly as wine bottles, there is more green glass than the UK market can use. Despite manufacturers increasing their usage rates of green glass, much of it is exported to other EU glass makers who use it to make new bottles at a significant carbon saving compared to using raw materials.
Fortunately, glass does not just have to be used just to make more bottles. In the future, golfers in trouble could find themselves in bunkers filled with sand created from crushed and ground glass. The same sand can be used in the construction industry or in waste-water treatment plants. All of this also helps reduce carbon emissions by reducing the needs to quarry the traditional sand.
There are also other markets which are being explored, from decorative kitchen work-surfaces to cladding for new buildings to bricks made from recycled glass, all of which look great and help to save the environment.
Five reasons to recycle glass:
1 Glass recycling saves energy
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Making new glass from recycled glass uses much less energy and reduces CO2 emissions. The energy saving from recycling one bottle could power a colour TV for 20 minutes. As every household in the UK uses on average 331 bottles and jars per year they could save enough energy to power a TV for nearly 4.5 days.
2 Glass recycling conserves the environment
Recycling your glass saves raw materials from being quarried and then thrown away in rubbish dumps as used bottles and jars. This saves hundreds of thousands of tonnes of quarrying each year and conserves the countryside for everyone.
3 Glass recycling creates employment
Jobs are created by glass collection schemes and by recycling centres, where recycled glass is crushed and cleaned.
4 Glass recycling increases public awareness of the problem of rubbish
Everyone can help the environment by recycling their glass. Even a small change in behaviour has a measurable benefit. This is a first step towards becoming environmentally active.
5 Glass recycling cuts waste disposal costs
By weight, glass makes up about eight per cent of our rubbish. Glass recycling reduces the cost of collecting and disposing of glass mixed in with our rubbish. British Glass is the trade association representing the UK glass manufacturers and recyclers. For more information on glass and glass recycling, visit www.britglass.org.uk
British Glass also produces
GLASSWORKS, an interactive educational
CD, with resources and accompanying website
(www.recyclingglass.co.uk), featuring
recycling mascots Billy Bottle, Jenny Jar and
Bertie Glass Bank.
