Here's a shocking figure for everyone out there in MyGreenClick land. Only 25 percentof all glass used is recycled. The rest ends up in landfills. The big deal about this is glass is 100 percent recyclable. Any color, any size, any shape, it's all 100 percent recyclable.
Can we even imagine a world without glass? This has got to be one of the most useful products ever invented that is essentially made up of all natural ingredients (sand, soda ash and limestone), can be recycled virtually indefinitely, and will never loose its purity. Glass is as good as gold.
But as I said, only 25 percent of all the glass is recycled which makes one wonder why more of it isn't? There are glass recycling containers almost everywhere, and it's not like it's hard to separate glass products from other products. I even have one of those typical milk crates I use for my glass. All my glass goes in there whenever I am done with it. Where I take my trash, I simply take the crate full of glass along too. It's incredibly easy.
And lest you think all glass goes back into just making bottles or other containers, here are some of the more interesting things glass is used for. It is used to make fiberglass, where the glass at the end of fiber really means glass! The friction ingredients at the ends of matches and in ammunition are also made of glass. Just take a look at the tip of a match once. Can you see all the sparkly stuff there? That's glass!
Reflecting paint that is used on highways and such is made to be reflective by adding glass to the compound. And if you have ever heard of sandblasting, that's really just another name for glass blasting. Tiny little chunks of sand (glass, really) are blasted at an object and used as an abrasive to smooth and clean the surface.
But here's one use for glass that sounds bizarre: experiments are now under way to make a glass airplane wing! Why? Well, glass doesn't stress and fatigue the way metal does. If a wing can be made that is not affected by fatigue, it is a far safer wing than anything we have out there now.
Those are the fun facts, but here are the hard facts. One ton of recycled glass saves one ton of raw materials. It takes 40 percent less energy to use recycled glass instead of making new glass, and because of that figure alone, as much as 70 percent of every glass container is made from recycled stock. So the infrastructure is there. We as consumers just need to feed it.
Glass is probably the easiest of all materials to recycle, so let's all make sure we do our part.
Source: BecauseAction.com
