Glass is an amazing substance. It has been in use for well over 3,000 years and was once more valuable than gold. The list of its positive attributes is impressive. The Glass Packaging Institute reports that:
Glass is made from non-toxic raw materials – silica, sand, soda ash, limestone and up to 70% recycled glass.
Glass is the only packaging material certified by the FDA as “generally regarded as safe.”
Glass can be recycled endlessly with no loss in quality or purity.
Glass is nonporous and impermeable so there are no interactions between glass packaging and the products to affect the flavor of food and beverages. No nasty aftertaste – ever.
Glass has an almost zero rate of chemical interaction, ensuring that the products inside a glass bottle keep their strength, aroma, and flavor.
Glass can be specified to absorb damaging ultraviolet light, ensuring product purity and taste. In fact, glass has an inherently longer shelf life than any packaging material.
Glass does not deteriorate, corrode, stain or fade, so products inside a glass container remain as fresh as when they were bottled.
Glass packaging can handle vacuum or high-pressure sealing, safeguarding against moisture and oxygen invasions. This protects food and beverages from spoilage and bacteria.
Glass containers are impermeable, air-tight, and transparent. You can see the freshness of food and beverages.
If our glass bottles and jars are 100% recyclable, why are they more likely to end up in a landfill than returned to the grocery store shelf as a new bottle? In 2018, 12.3 million tons of glass products were manufactured but only 3.1 million tons were recycled. Twenty-eight billion glass bottles and jars are buried in landfills every year.
Single-stream recycling which mixes all recyclable materials in the same container is a significant factor. The convenience of the system is believed to encourage people to recycle more. When comingled recyclables are compacted, the glass breaks and becomes a contaminant which effectively eliminates its own value as an infinitely recyclable item and lowers the sale value of the other materials.
The glass that is recovered from single-stream recycling typically becomes fiberglass which is no longer recyclable and ends up in the landfill at the end of its usefulness. When glass is separated, it gets recycled repeatedly.
An easy solution to this problem is to add a few recyclable material streams to the process. Municipalities and businesses across the country are able to keep recycling profitable by drastically reducing the contamination that occurs with single-stream recycling. According to The Glass Packaging Institute, only 40% of glass from single-stream recycling ends up being recycled into new products, while that number surpasses 90% for multi-stream.
“The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a compact fluorescent bulb for 20 hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials. Mining and transporting raw materials for glass produces about 385 pounds of waste for every ton of glass that is made. If recycled glass is substituted for half of the raw materials, the waste is cut by more than 80%,” according to Recycling Revolution’s Recycling Facts information.
Currently ten states in the U.S. have “bottle bills” and six more are considering them. These are laws that charge a refundable deposit on all single-use beverage bottles. Bottle bills are known for impressively high return rates among eligible containers.
Given that glass is non-toxic, ensures that the contents in glass bottles and jars are unaffected by interactions between the packaging and the contents, and is infinitely recyclable, encouraging our local recycling centers to build a glass recycling stream into their recycling program seems like a win-win for profitability, people and the environment.
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