Call us at 888.619.2226

Tag Archive for: recycled glass

Is glass coming to a concrete near you?

/in , /by

Is glass coming to a concrete near you?

Is glass coming to a concrete near you?

As cities across the United States struggle with the question of glass recycling, some companies are envisioning a new future for old bottles and jars. Google and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation teamed up in 2010 to examine “circular economies.” A circular economy is one in which materials are used and re-used in ways that limit the need for truly raw materials.

One area that the MacArthur Foundation examined was concrete. Concrete is a common building material, but it has some environmental downsides. Cement – a primary component of concrete – generates a lot of CO2 during its production. Various concrete mixtures can also contain toxic heavy metals like cadmium, arsenic and lead. These toxic inclusions come from fly ash and slag, which are sometimes used in concrete mixtures as a substitute for some of the cement.

Ground glass is being considered as a substitute for fly ash, which is in short supply. Fly ash is a residue generated by coal-fired power plants. No one’s building coal fired power plants today, and as more plants convert to natural gas, the supply of fly ash dwindles further. At the same time, the demand for concrete is rising, so finding an acceptable substitute for fly ash is a priority.

Substituting glass for fly ash could solve a couple of problems. First, it could create a viable market for recycled glass. That’s big because so many cities struggle with glass recycling, and it could remove some of the 8 million tons of container glass from US landfills every year. Second, it could reduce the demand for cement, which could in turn reduce cement-related carbon emissions significantly. Each ton of cement that’s produced releases a ton of carbon into the atmosphere.

Right now, using glass powder (called pozzolan) in place of fly ash would increase the price of concrete slightly – less than 5% – but it would decrease the carbon footprint of concrete to about 10% of its current size by reducing demand for cement. It would also eliminate the need to import fly ash from other places, like China and South America. The Foundation estimates that a pozzolan plant needs about 40,000 tons of container glass each year to keep up with the demand for ground glass, and multiple pozzolan plants would be needed to meet the annual demand for concrete. That’s still significantly less than the amount of glass that gets recycled, but concrete production offers a positive market for recycled glass – something that has so far been hard to come by.

Glassprimer™ glass paint is a specialized glass coating that bonds permanently to glass surfaces. GlassPrimer also makes a glass surface molecular activator that is designed to work with UV-inkjet glass printing processes. For more information about Glassprimer™ glass paint, please visit the rest of our site. If you’d like to purchase Glassprimer™ glass paint, please visit our online store .

Photo Credit: Sparkle Motion, via Flickr.com

Cities struggle to cope with glass recycling

/in , /by
Cities struggle to cope with glass recycling

Cities struggle to cope with glass recycling

If you want to know about the status of glass recycling in the United States, some quick Internet searching will allow you to create a fairly long list of municipalities that have dumped curbside recycling of glass. Glass is easily one of the most recyclable materials, and it costs less to recycle glass than it does to make new glass, so what’s the trouble with glass recycling?

The cost of transporting, sorting and storing recyclable glass adds a layer of complexity that most municipalities don’t want to (or can’t) deal with. Glass is heavy, which means it’s expensive to transport, and there is more supply than demand for glass, recycled glass and crushed glass, called cullet.

Anchorage, AK is one municipality that’s trying to change the outcome for much of the city’s glass containers. According to city workers, Anchorage – a city of just about 300,000 people – collects about 1,200 tons of glass continers each year. Like many other cities, they don’t allow curbside collection of glass. Anchorage doesn’t have a local reclamation facility, so it bundles its recyclables and sends them off to Washington State. Adding glass into the mix would add significant weight, which would increase transportation costs and diminish already-thin returns.

Instead, glass is collected in three aggregating facilities around the city and retained. The State of Alaska has recently permitted construction projects to use 100% crushed glass as backfill on water and sewer pipe projects, and it can be used as a backfill component for other construction projects. In addition, finely crushed glass can be used like sand to create traction on snow-covered walkways and parking lots.

Other cities like Knoxville, TN have just eliminated glass from their single-stream curbside recycling programs. According to city officials, glass collection is logistically difficult and much of the collected glass ends up being broken at their facility. Broken glass is hard to handle and can damage the sorting equipment that’s the backbone of a single-stream recycling program. In addition, it’s virtually impossible to find buyers for mixed-color glass.

Roswell, GA has agreed to pay its curbside collector an additional $10,000 per month for the next six months to continue picking up container glass. For many cities, glass recycling has gone from being a revenue stream to being an expense. It’s one they’re unlikely to bear for very long.

Cities continue to cope with the demand by residents that glass be included in recycling programs, even when it’s difficult to find buyers for the resulting product. Many cities are crushing the glass to use it as landfill cover. Others are simply landfilling the product to free storage space at their reclamation facilities. A growing number of cities are simply not accepting glass into their recycling streams at all.

Glassprimer™ glass paint is a specialized glass coating that bonds permanently to glass surfaces. GlassPrimer also makes a glass surface molecular activator that is designed to work with UV-inkjet glass printing processes. For more information about Glassprimer™ glass paint, please visit the rest of our site. If you’d like to purchase Glassprimer™ glass paint, please visit our online store .

Photo Credit: josef stuefer, via Flickr.com

Recycling glass is good for the environment

/in , /by
Recycling glass is good for the environment

Recycling glass is good for the environment

Recently, we discussed the trend in some major cities to eliminate glass from their curbside recycling programs. The rationale for eliminating glass was primarily economic: glass takes up a lot of space in recycling storage facilities that could be used to house other materials. Glass is heavy, and difficult to transport. Glass is dangerous, because workers can get cut on broken glass. In addition, container glass needs to be sorted by color prior to recycling. Finally, when it comes down to it, glass is inert, and can sit in a landfill indefinitely without harming the environment. It’s a higher priority to keep other, more dangerous items out of the landfill, and if the warehouse space can be used for these other, more dangerous materials, then it’s a fair tradeoff.

Recycling glass takes less energy

You can probably come up with even more reasons NOT to recycle glass, but nothing changes the fact that glass is perfectly recyclable. A finite amount of glass could be produced, melted down and reproduced in a continuous cycle, with no loss in the quality of the end product. Recycled glass takes less energy to melt down and recreate than it takes to produce virgin glass entering the product stream from raw materials.

Glass is superior to plastic or other disposable packaging materials (or building materials, for that matter) because it bears the designation “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS). What you put into a glass container will not change the container, and the container will not change the substance inside of it. The same can’t be said for plastic packaging, which has been demonstrated as a source of contamination. This is especially important for food packaging, and products that are meant to come into contact with food, like cups, plates and utensils.

It takes a lot of energy to create glass from scratch. Furnaces, which run on gas or electricity, need to consume a lot of energy to create the temperatures needed to turn raw materials into their molten state. It takes about one-third less energy to recycle one ton of glass than it does to convert raw materials into one ton of virgin glass.

In glass recycling, it’s typical to mix used glass with new glass to create a hybrid product. From a product quality perspective, there’s no reason “old” glass couldn’t be used entirely to make new containers, and the Glass Packaging Institute (GPI) set a goal for its members to use at least 50% recycled glass in their production processes by 2013. Practically, it’s possible to make new glass using 95% reclaimed glass and 5% new raw materials. The 5% drop is accounted for by contamination and other factors. Scrap glass, called cullet, is typically broken into pieces, but some pieces end up being too small (even dust-like) to be recycled.

A city’s decision to collect or not collect container glass is based on the economics of transporting, sorting and storing glass. Taken over the lifecycle of the glass, even with increased storage, sorting and transportation costs, recycled glass still makes both economic and environmental sense.

If you’d like more information about decorating with environmentally friendly glass, please check out the rest of our site. If you’d like to purchase Glassprimer™ glass paint, please visit our online store .

Photo Credit: Eric Bartholomew, via Flickr.com

Recycling glass? Not so much in cities

/in , /by
Recycling glass? Not so much in cities

Recycling glass? Not so much in cities

Earlier this year, Houston joined the growing list of cities that no longer offers curbside recycling for container glass. It seems shocking because we’ve always been told that recycling glass is easy and environmentally conscious. It is, but why are cities like Houston, Marietta GA, Harrisburg, PA, Santa Fe, NM, Baton Rouge, LA and Charleston, SC turning away from collecting glass for recycling?

Recycling glass is problematic, costly

The reasons vary, but it all comes down to money. According to Pratt Industries, the recycler for Spartanburg and Greenville counties in South Carolina, glass is the most costly item to recycle and excluding glass from the recycling stream frees up space in the company’s storage and processing facilities for other recyclable materials.

The National Waste and Recycling Association says that the sorting requirements of glass, combined with its weight and other factors make glass the most likely candidate for elimination from recycling programs. Since glass does not break down or create any toxic byproducts, it can sit safely in a landfill in favor of other less environmentally friendly materials.

Complicating the matter further is the issue of labels. Container glass is frequently labeled with paper-and-glue labels, which tends to foul the recycling stream and requires additional handling. In addition, glass breaks, making it dangerous to handle and sort.

Houston, which recently signed a two-year recycling disposal contract with Waste Management, almost abandoned recycling altogether, after difficult contract negotiations. The city was pressured by a significant budget shortfall, and the city administration was not initially able to come to terms it felt the city could afford. By streamlining the curbside recycling program – including the omission of glass – the city was able to find an arrangement that works.

Despite changes to the curbside recycling program, Houston is still in the glass recycling game. The city maintains collection points where residents who are interested in recycling glass can bring their containers. As the fourth largest city in the US, however, the loss of an easy curbside recycling program for glass means that as many as 25 tons of glass will now end up in Houston’s landfills instead of in a recycling program.

Further complicating the glass recycling picture is the fact that the bottom is dropping out of the market for many recycled materials, including glass. Not being able to find buyers means that slim profit margins on glass are in danger of turning into losses for recyclers, and no one is willing to take on a losing proposition.

In the mean time, gaps in municipal glass recycling programs are being filled by third-parties, although environmentalists and glass manufacturers alike worry that the stream of recyclable glass will diminish – pushing the cost of virgin glass higher and redirecting a material that is infinitely recyclable into the waste stream instead.

Glass is truly infinitely recyclable and reusable. If you’d like ideas for decorating with glass, please check out the rest of our site. If you’d like to purchase Glassprimer™ glass paint, please visit our online store .

Photo Credit: Steven Goodwin, via FreeImages.com

Working with recycled glass

/in , /by
Working with recycled glass

Working with recycled glass

Glass is one of the most common – and most versatile – decorating materials available today. Glass hasn’t always been abundant; initially, all functional glass was crafted by hand, and formulations sometimes contained materials (like lead) that aren’t suitable for daily use. Today, most glass is mass produced. Only a small fraction of total glass production is hand-crafted. Because it is so commonly available, glass is frequently discarded after use and ends up in the landfill.

Recycled glass is strong, versatile

That’s unfortunate, because glass is easy to recycle and reuse. Glass recycling is an environmentally friendly process because glass can be recycled endlessly, and introducing crushed glass into the manufacturing mixture allows glass manufacturers to use less energy what’s required to manufacture brand new glass.

Recycled glass possesses the same strength that new glass does, which means that the recycling process does not degrade the glass in any way. In addition, recycling makes economic sense, since it costs less to recycle existing glass than it does to create new glass. Recycling glass into glass manufacturing allows the glass to be created at a lower temperature, and extends the life of the glass-making equipment. As you can see, there’s very little downside to recycling glass!

You can use recycled glass as a decorating medium throughout your home, as well as in commercial applications. Glass can combined with other materials including resin and cement to create surfaces like countertops, or it can be reformed into 100% glass. Typically, glass countertops are custom fabricated and are at least 1″ thick, but can be fabricated at a thickness of 4″ or more.

Using glass as a countertop material opens up a number of decorating possibilities. Glass countertops can be backpainted with Glassprimer™ glass paint in virtually any color. They can also be illuminated with LED lights to create dramatic effects.

Custom glass applications aren’t limited to kitchens. You can also use glass countertops in the bathroom, the bar or in outdoor entertainment areas. Glassprimer™ glass paint offers superior durability and UV-resistance, meaning that it won’t fade, peel or delaminate, even in the toughest environments.

Glass is an exceptional, versatile decorating surface that remains beautiful, even with everyday use. If you’d like more information about working with glass paint, please check out the rest of our site. If you’d like to purchase Glassprimer™ glass paint, please visit our online store .
Photo Credit: Nancy Hugo, via Flickr.com