Of all of the materials that can be recycled, glass is one of the most rewarding in terms of efficiency and value. Here is a statistic – if you place a glass bottle in a landfill, it could take as long as a million years to decompose. However, if you place it in a recycling bin it can be made into a new glass bottle within less than a month.
If that isn’t a good enough reason to recycle glass, then think on this. Glass is the only material that is 100% efficient in its recycling. That is to say that if you recycle a glass bottle, you will get the same standard of glass from the process that you put into it – and this cycle holds permanently so the same container could be recycled forever with no loss of quality.
If you go to the supermarket today and buy something in a glass bottle, the likelihood is that seventy per cent of the glass in that bottle will have come from a recycling process. On the other hand, to make glass from scratch – a process that features heating substances to a temperature of more than two thousand degrees Fahrenheit – it requires energy and causes a lot of pollution.
Recycled glass is also probably the safest recycled material of all, because it has very little chemical interaction with anything it comes into contact with. This means that very little newly-recycled glass has to be disposed of because it does not come up to an acceptable standard.