by Thom Zaremba, shareholder at Roetzel & Andress
We’ve taken a deep dive into the “resilience” of America’s buildings. We looked at how wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters force us to focus on resiliency. We also found out that glass in an existing building can be a litmus test to determine whether a building needs an upgrade to the current code.
We also looked at what happens when the glass in a building reaches the end of its useful life. We learned that even though glass could theoretically be recycled an infinite number of times, putting it back into the float process is difficult and costly. We also found that end-of-life glass can be saved from an eternity in landfills by harnessing its retroreflective qualities in roadway paint or processing it back into sand or even into countertops. Despite these and other uses, as of 2018, we still send between 7.5 and 7.6 million tons of glass to landfills annually, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Why is that?
I recently replaced a glass storm door with a more modern one. However, I had to dispose of about 18 square feet of tempered glass. I decided to recycle it. The city where I live collects “recyclables” once every other week. When I went to its recycling website, I was surprised to be told NOT to recycle it! While clean glass jars and bottles could be put in the recycling bin, all other types of glass (i.e., windows, glass doors, mirrors, tabletops and drinkware) were to be sent to the landfill.
Why?
As I began researching, I learned that recycling is a complex industry sensitive to various costs, including the cost of collecting, transporting, sorting and processing multiple types of waste materials back into useful things. I also discovered that a primary reason we send millions of tons of glass to landfills is that most municipalities use “single-stream recycling.”
That means that ALL types of “permissible” recyclables are thrown together into a single container. That container is dumped into a transport truck, where its contents are thrown together with the jumbled contents of hundreds of other containers. To make room, the transport truck crushes its load before delivering it to a recycling center, called a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). At the MRF, people and specialized machines attempt to separate the different types of crushed recyclables thrown together at the beginning of the process. Sounds crazy.
This seemingly crazy, single-stream recycling system is driven by cost and is intended to make recycling economic by minimizing collection and transportation costs. However, it virtually guarantees that most glass products will be included on the “Do Not Recycle” list. Let’s find out why.
Glass breaks! When glass is included in the single-stream recycling bin, glass fragments become one with the cardboard, paper, plastics and other products crushed together during transport. When the load—now contaminated with glass particles—arrives at the MRF, it is impossible to separate them and, since they all require a different recycling process, the glass contamination sadly results in the entire load having to be sent off to the landfill.
So, let’s just set up a second stream of recycling for glass bottles, jars, end-of-life windows, glass doors and all the other types of glass products. Not so fast. That probably won’t work either. Why? Because glass bottles and jars melt at one temperature, but glass windows and doors that have been tempered for impact safety melt at a much higher temperature. The result is that glass jars and bottles can’t be commingled for recycling with most architectural glass.
Okay, so let’s set up a third recycling stream for architectural glass. Again, not so fast. If recycling back into the float process is the objective, windows and glass doors might be made of annealed glass, tempered glass or glass coated with any number of low-E or other coatings. Additionally, they might be framed using materials and alloys made of aluminum, steel, vinyl, fiberglass or other materials. All these different types of glass, coatings and framing materials make blending the glass for easy recycling all but impossible.
Given all these difficulties, is recycling glass really that important? Can’t we continue to recycle the many plastic products that have replaced the use of glass in so many different applications? We’ll dive into that question in my next blog! Please stay tuned!