The production and use of glass has a number of environmental impacts. New glass is made from four main ingredients: Sand, Soda ash, Limestone and other additives for colour or special treatments.
Although there is no shortage of these raw materials as yet, they all have to be quarried, which can damage the landscape, affect the environment and use more energy.
Glass is 100% recyclable and can be endlessly reprocessed with no loss of quality. Therefore by simply recycling our glass we can:
- Conserve non-renewable fossil fuels
- Reduce the emission of harmful gasses into the atmosphere: The addition of domestic waste glass, also known as cullet, to a furnace in the glass manufacturing process, substantially reduces the energy requirement and decreases CO2 emissions. Each tonne of cullet, which is added to the furnace, saves 1.2 tonnes of raw materials, decreasing emissions still further.
- Reduce the consumption of energy: New glass takes a lot of energy to make, first in transporting the materials to the furnace and then to heat them to a high temperature. An efficient furnace burns 4 gigajoules (GJ) (unit of energy measuring heat) to melt every tonne of glass – that’s the energy equivalent of burning 250kg of wood.
