Glass is a renewable, recyclable material that has many environmental benefits. It can help to reduce climate change and save precious natural resources. Glass is highly valued for its inert nature, which contributes to the protection of people's health and well-being.
Mitigate climate change
Glass can be used to conserve energy in many applications. This is evident in the case of insulating glass for facades and windows, but it also applies to less-known products like weight-lightening reinforcement fiber used in automotive, aviation, and other modes of transport to reduce vehicle weight and fuel consumption.
Glass can also be used to produce renewable energy via solar-thermal, photovoltaic and wind turbine applications. This is largely due to the light weight reinforcement glass fibres.
Conserve natural resources
Glass is a resource-efficient material that is made from abundant natural raw materials such as sand or glass waste (cullets). Glass can be recycled in a close loop, over and over, and is fully recyclable.
This is especially true for glass bottles, which have an average recycling rate of between 50% and 80%. Glass recycling allows for significant savings in raw materials and preserves natural resources. Cullets melt at lower temperatures than raw materials, which helps glass recycling to save energy. melting takes less energy.
Other glass sectors make great efforts to recycle glass after it is used, even though each sector has specific requirements and quality requirements. Glass industries produce very little solid waste during manufacturing. Most glass waste (cullets), are immediately recycled and returned to furnaces to be used as raw material.
