Talk:Glass recycling

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This page needs some gramatical fixes, and more content is needed as well

I've tweaked the wording regarding remelting Pyrex, I hope this is more satisfactory Hertzsprung 20:02, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I have completed a restructuring and clean up exercise removing much irrelevant information and incorrect statements. I have also added references from the UK glass recycling industry --Alex 14:37, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Merge with Recycling 2 Interesting Omissisions 3 UK Centric 4 Rephrasing

[edit] Merge with Recycling

I also disagree with the merger although I think the article needs to be improved and Wikified bring it into line with the Waste management category (subcat Recycling). It also needs to incorporate a section on the production of aggregates from glass which may be a valid method of recycling lower grade glass waste streams. Reference to standards & specification for glass waste such as the BSI PAS 101 and 102 would add credibility.--Alex 11:15, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I should also point out that reuse is definately not recycling. Please refer to the waste hierarchy!it will help to recycle

[edit] Interesting Omissisions

The article seems to neglect any mention of the fact that glass is not biodegradable. Hence, any glass that is not recycled does not biodegrade “harmlessly” back into the environment. This would imply that a significant proportion of that glass which is produced ends up being disseminated throughout the environment. Surely there should be some attempt to mention the below :

1)Quantify the proportion of glass which has been produced which ends up disseminated into the general environment.

2)Qualitatively describe the effect that glass of varying types is likely to have in the environment. For example, does glass inhibit or alter soil fertility? How might significant quantities of broken glass alter soil structure? Does glass alter the adsorption properties of soil and garbage in general?

3)This is a general comment which can be made for all recyclable materials, but how easily does glass disseminate throughout the environment? That is, once centralised (and low entropy sources) of glass are utilised in normal economic discourse (for, say, transporting milk or other drinking materials, say) – how quickly might that glass find itself distributed throughout the environment in a difficult to reuse/recycle manner once again (say, if a glass bottle is broken and then mixed into soil, etc...).

4)The wikipedia article on recycling states that : “Glass can be recycled indefinitely as its structure does not deteriorate when reprocessed.” However, this does NOT take into account the obvious fact that the ability to recycle glass is limited by the ability to collect it once it is disseminated for general economic use (a point which is related to the above). After glass breaks, for example, and after glass is littered on the streets to be mixed into debris and soil, it becomes extremely difficult to deal with.

5)Are there ways of reclaiming glassy materials from soils and general waste? It would seem that it is difficult to do this due to the fact that glass is chemically inert and probably not open to any obvious methods of separation from soil/general waste for this reason. Mechanical separation processes might be possible – though I am doubtful of whether large scale reclamation of glass from soil could ever be made economical. It might, for example, be possible to pick out crushed glass from soil-water mixtures as glass would have a very particular density (and could hence be removed via centrifugal separation or density based separation techniques).

6)A retort/comment on the point that “Heat-resistant glass like Pyrex or borosilicate glass should not be disposed of in the glass container as even a single piece of such material will alter the viscosity of the fluid in the furnace at remelt.” It would seem that, once various different types of glass have been sorted for recycling by remelting in furnaces, it should be relatively trivial to separate different types of glass using something such as centrifugal separation purposes/other separation processes.

I'm sure that there's other useful stuff which could be added – but the subject would seem worthy of a PhD thesis.

CountNihilismus 03:19, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] UK Centric

This article strikes me as very UK-centric. For example, no mention is made of what happens to glass that is collected in the United States by Container deposit legislation. This glass is not separated by colour by the consumer and some of it invariably ends up getting broken by the machines. Is it separated later by hand? Are there mechanical separators capable of sorting glass (possibly even broken glass) by colour? There seems to be a lot of environmental justification of the process but no scientific explanation of how it actually works. -Drdisque (talk) 04:38, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I completely agree. Even the names of small towns in England aren't identified as such. Moreover, I came here looking for information about the fact that, in the United States at least, some recycling facilities don't accept glass items because, they claim, there is no market for them. To the extent they are available, I'd love to see statistics about (1) the rate of glass recycables collection, and (2) the market for glass recylables in countries worldwide. The article in its current form talks articulately about certain benefits of glass reclables but lacks such statistics. 208.54.95.124 (talk) 17:39, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I added some content on Canada, from a U.S. daily, no less. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 03:03, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rephrasing

The sentence "Every tonne of glass used for producing new glass items saves 315 kg of carbon dioxide.[1]" could be more appropriate if the verb reused was used instead of used? The sentence might be misleading. It could also be changed to "Every tonne of used glass recycled in new glass items saves 315 kg of carbon dioxide.[1]" Martlego (talk) 15:23, 28 March 2008 (UTC)