[Image above] Credit: National Glass Association
Household chores are a rite of passage for many children, and one of my tasks was to flatten the cardboard boxes for recycling each week. But one day when I was preparing to perform this task, my dad let me know that the city no longer required boxes to be flattened. In fact, the city no longer required any kind of preparation or sorting of recyclables because it had adopted a new single-stream recycling process.
Though single-stream recycling is considered easier for consumers to participate in, even I knew at that young age that mixing materials would cause trouble for workers at the recycling facility. Placing everything in a single bin increases the risk of cross-contamination, meaning additional downstream processing is required to make the materials reusable. In some cases, waste streams are so contaminated that the recyclable materials are simply sent to landfill instead.
Cross-contamination is just one of the reasons that glass recycling rates are so low in the United States, as discussed in this month’s episode of Ceramic Tech Chat, which published on Wednesday. In the episode, Alfred University assistant professor Collin Wilkinson outlined some of the many factors that make glass recycling so challenging, including the cost of transporting glass waste to recycling facilities.
A decrease in transportation costs could lead to an increase in the feasibility of recycling by effectively increasing the radius of recyclability around factories. However, these costs are largely inflexible, and if anything, likely to increase in the future due to fuel and regulatory costs.
Instead of bringing glass to recycling facilities, the script could be flipped by bringing recycling facilities to the glass. In other words, adding glass recycling locations in underserved areas could help make recycling more economically favorable compared to landfilling.
Implementing this option, however, requires knowing which areas require facilities. Fortunately, the National Glass Association (NGA) is working to help answer this question through the relaunch of its “World of Glass Map” this month.
The “World of Glass Map” is an online, interactive map of global float glass manufacturing locations and North American glass fabrication facilities. Thanks to recent updates, website visitors can now easily view locations and capabilities, as well as search and sort companies by name and location.
In an NGA press release, NGA president and CEO Nicole Harris says that the map and its accompanying downloadable database are “vital for understanding the vast capacity and capability of glass manufacturers and fabricators.”
The association is now working on adding glass recycling locations to the map, which should be available in October 2024. This addition “will help move NGA forward on its priority issue to keep glass out of the landfill,” Harris says.
View the “World of Glass Map” at this link. NGA members can download the full fabricator and float plant database for free, and nonmembers can purchase it for $100 in the NGA store.