Can you recycle glass

The use of glass over plastic has been rising in popularity in recent years because of the effects plastic has on the environment and our health. Plastic has toxins that are not healthy for our bodies, and these toxins are emitted when the plastic is heated. Glass is far better than plastic for the environment because it can be recycled over and over again.

However, some glass cannot be recycled at all, or needs to be recycled differently. So, before you throw all of your glass products in the recycling bin, be on the lookout for the items below. For the most part, glassware that is used in the kitchen and for food items is completely recyclable. Items such as condiment containers, food storage, jars, and more can be put in your recycling bin. However, not all glass is the same.

An easy way to know if your glass can be recycled is by looking at its recycling code. If it is an approved code by your recycling program, then it is likely safe to put in the recycling bin! Items made of ceramic appear to be similar to glass, but they are actually made of clay. The reason glass can be recycled is that the glass can be melted down again and shaped into something new.

With clay, you cannot melt it down. There are some processes where organizations can crush up ceramics and add water to reshape it, but this does not happen at recycling plants. If you do have ceramics that you would like to get rid of in a sustainable way, consider donating or selling them. There are many people that would love to give your ceramics a new use. You can also use your old ceramics for gardening or other household uses.

Recycling glass has many proven environmental benefits—it reduces emissions, saves energy, and reduces consumption of raw materials. And as a common household item, recycling the material maintains much public support. So why is glass no longer being accepted for recycling in some markets? The reasons are varied. In a single stream recycling system, glass is increasingly becoming the contaminant.

Broken glass can contaminate other recyclables like paper and cardboard, lowering their value. Since the China import ban , recyclers are increasingly focused on quality and reducing contamination to maintain the value of their recyclable materials. Broken glass is not only a safety hazard to workers, but it can also damage machines at recycling facilities. As a result, glass is increasing processing costs. Most manufacturers require recyclable glass to be sorted by color in order to produce high quality glass bottles and jars.

Glass is difficult to sort when broken, and if broken down too finely, glass may become too difficult to reprocess.

When recyclers find it too difficult or expensive to separate out glass, they send the entire stream to the landfill. Glass is heavy and expensive to transport. Faced with high costs, some communities are paying to have the glass specially crushed for use in construction. And while this is certainly a use for glass, it is not necessary the best use. Mandatory glass recycling programs in the s flooded the market with recyclable glass, causing prices to drop.

Over the past two decades, glass has also been replaced by aluminum and plastic for some products, leading to less demand. For restaurants and beverage retailers, the proliferation of the craft beer industry means more on draft and in cans and fewer glass bottles. Aluminum bottles have also become very popular among beer consumers in recent years.

Wine is still difficult, because there are fewer options for wine on draft and in cans, but that is expected to change. Only about one-third gets recycled. The glass industry regularly mixes cullet—a granular material made by crushing bottles and jars usually collected from recycling programs—with sand, limestone, and other raw materials to produce the molten glass needed to manufacture new bottles and jars.

Contact us to opt out anytime. Manufacturers agree that using cullet benefits glassmakers, the environment, and consumers. And national surveys show that Americans overwhelmingly favor glass recycling and deem it to be important. Yet as the percentage of glass recycled in Spain and the UK, for example, has doubled and tripled in the past 25 years, respectively, the numbers in the US have barely budged.

The US glass-recycling shortfall comes down to the interplay between the quality and availability of cullet and the economics of making glass, he explains.

And, he says, the recycling rate discrepancies between the US and other countries result mainly from differences in government policy and consumer education and habits. Related: Recycling renewables. When studying glass recycling, the first thing that becomes clear is that cullet is extremely useful.

It provides many benefits to glass manufacturing. First, cullet allows glass manufacturers to reduce their need for raw materials. One kilogram of cullet replaces 1. Nordmeyer, vice president of global sustainability at Owens-Illinois, a major manufacturer of glass bottles and containers. Cullet also helps manufacturers save on energy costs. Running furnaces at lower temperatures extends furnace lives and reduces operating costs and, as a result, the price of the final glass products.

Mauro, adding cullet to the feed mixture also improves the quality of glass products. Mauro is a materials scientist and glass specialist who spent nearly 20 years at the glassmaker Corning. Also, using cullet limits the deposition of crystals of unmelted starting materials, as well as the formation of streaks and optical imperfections due to incomplete mixing of those materials.

Finally, cullet has a significant environmental benefit. Adding the material to the mix reduces greenhouse gas emissions during manufacturing, Nordmeyer points out. When the carbonates from limestone melt with the other materials, they release CO 2.

Basically, for every 6 metric tons of cullet used in manufacturing, glassmakers can cut 1 metric ton of CO 2 emissions. Related: Chemistry may have solutions to our plastic trash problem. Getting cullet in a clean, furnace-ready form generally requires a lot of processing. And depending on how the US recycles, that processing is done relatively inefficiently compared with what happens in Europe.

US municipalities manage residential recycling primarily via single-stream curbside collection. Single-stream means residents use their recycling bins to comingle glass with aluminum and steel cans, various types of plastic, newsprint, junk mail, cardboard, and other paper products. One example is a popular single-serve coffee-brewing product that features a plastic cup and foil lid.

Garbage, like those products, contaminates all the recyclables in the bin, Nordmeyer says. That sorting happens via a combined manual-plus-automated multistep process at a materials recovery facility. About such facilities operate in the US, according to Rue. To start the sorting process, front-end loaders dump huge piles of single-stream recyclables onto conveyor belts.

Trained operators manually remove scrap metal, textiles, hoses, and other materials that never belonged in the recycling bin and can damage sorting equipment. Next, automated separators called star screens, together with powerful air jets, remove cardboard and paper, while magnets pull out iron-containing materials.

After several more separation steps, a device known as a glass-breaking screen removes most of the glass from the single-stream load so it can be sent to cullet suppliers, who clean it and make it furnace ready for glass manufacturers. Multistream recycling, which is a far less common approach in the US, is simpler on the processing end. In these programs, consumers separate glass from other recyclables, depositing them in glass-only collection bins.

This type of collection requires a high level of consumer education and is considerably more expensive than single-stream collection. But glass from multistream collection is much cleaner than what comes out of the single-stream supply.

Multistream glass typically bypasses materials recovery facilities and goes directly to cullet processors. Related: Stiff-yet-supple plastic can be reshaped and recycled.

But most municipalities in the US stick with single stream because the collection costs are lower than those with multistream systems. To switch to multistream systems, these municipalities would need to introduce taxes or fees to meet the higher collection and handling costs.

And most municipalities are reluctant to do so. But even if the US shifted more to multistream collection, there are other economic factors standing in the way of increasing glass-recycling rates to European levels. One significant difference between the US and European nations is size. Distances in the US between a materials recovery facility and a cullet supplier, or a cullet supplier and a buyer tend to be greater.

Transporting glass waste and cullet is costly because of their weight, and those costs can be a deal breaker for some glassmakers and can prevent would-be cullet suppliers from opening processing facilities. For example, in the US, some materials recovery facilities do not recover any glass from their single streams because there are no nearby buyers to make it worthwhile, according to Rue.

Another factor affecting the costs of recovering cullet from glass waste is that cullet specifications vary from one manufacturer to another depending on the intended application. These costs and limited supplies of quality cullet continue to stand in the way of US manufacturers increasing their use of recycled material. Most of the efforts to boost glass-recycling rates in the US have been state and local affairs.

For example, 10 states have passed so-called bottle bills that require consumers to pay deposits on beverage bottles. The idea is consumers will be more likely to recycle the bottles to get back their deposits.