How can we recycle glass?

Glass is one material that is easy to recycle. Like metal and paper, it is made with raw materials from the natural world.

The more we recycle the fewer raw materials we need. Recycling materials like glass also saves energy.

Glass is made in a furnace.

Glass is made from sand and limestone. These raw materials are mined from the ground and heated in a furnace. They melt to make a hot, runny mixture. This is shaped by being blown or poured into moulds. The red-hot mixture cools to form glass.

 

 

This broken glass is ready to recycle.

Glass can be made from recycled bottles and jars instead of fresh sand and limestone. The used glass is smashed up to form a substance called cullet. The cullet is then reheated. The furnace does not need to be so hot to melt cullet, so recycling glass saves energy as well as raw materials.

 

 

At a bottle bank we sort glass into different colours.

First, wash your used bottles and remove the lids before you take them to the bottle bank. Most bottle banks have separate holes for brown, clear and green glass, so the glass is sorted before it goes to the recycling plant. As well as bottles, recycled glass can be used to make glass bricks, tiles and fibreglass boats or canoes.

 

 

 

Glass can be reused, so avoid plastic bottles.

Reduce waste by asking your family to buy milk and juice in glass bottles instead of plastic bottles or paper cartons.

Glass milk bottles are returned and refilled up to a dozen times. But plastic and paper cartons are used just once before being thrown away, and plastic bottles do not rot.

 

Picture Credit : Google